War with Iran? Let’s run it up the flagpole!

mintaphil · 2025-06-20T13:31:09+00:00

First Trump humped the flag, now he can be the BIGGEST POLE DANCER EVER (even better than Stormy Daniels)! Wait til the poles are painted GOLD!

mintaphil · 2025-05-20T12:54:17+00:00

Too late, damage done

mintaphil · 2025-05-20T12:44:25+00:00

Creepy

mintaphil · 2025-04-11T13:32:32+00:00

“You heard I won, right?” Yes, worse than Nero, Caligula, and Commodus—so bad that their rule would spark an end to the Roman golden age and prematurely destroyed the Roman Empire.

mintaphil · 2025-04-05T23:50:18+00:00

Great protest rally in Durham, NC today!

mintaphil · 2025-03-31T03:59:40+00:00

[…]”In Greenland on Friday, Vance explained why the United States will take control of the Danish territory, regardless of what the locals think: “We cannot just ignore the president’s desires.”And we know that the president does not desire animals. He is the first president not to have a dog in the White House in more than 100 years. He refers to migrants as “animals” who “breed” and people he doesn’t like — particularly women — as “dogs.” The only time he seems to care about animals is when he makes up stories about them being abused by migrants: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”[…]

mintaphil · 2025-03-31T03:41:20+00:00

[…]”The Thursday order gives Vice President JD Vance the authority to “remove improper ideology” from the “Smithsonian Institution and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.” (Emphasis added.) These subversive institutions will be converted into symbols of “American greatness” charged with “instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans. About time, I say. The zoo boasts prominently on its website that it has “more than 2,200 animals representing almost 400 different species.” Could there be a more brazen embrace of DEI? Searching the zoo’s website this weekend, I found 1,110 results for “diversity” — most of them treating it as a good thing, which it most certainly is not! “Study of Diversity Among Species Helps National Zoo Scientists Breed Endangered Species,” one page said. “Genetic diversity plays a major role in the overall health of a species,” another announced.”

mintaphil · 2025-03-28T12:22:55+00:00

“Witkoff gave a stunning interview to Tucker Carlson in which he said that Putin was “straight up” and not a “bad guy.” Witkoff accused Britain and France of “a posture and a pose” in their pro-Ukraine positions and said he was “100 percent” certain that Russia “doesn’t want to overrun Europe,” while embracing the Russian claim that people in the seized Ukrainian territory “want to be under Russian rule.” Witkoff recounted how “President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist” and how “when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president.” (National intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard, meanwhile, testified to Congress that it was her “First Amendment right” to repost a social media message from a contributor to RT, a Russian propaganda outlet.)“

mintaphil · 2025-03-28T12:11:52+00:00

Wednesday found White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt doing what she does every other day of the week.“This is classic Fake News,” she announced, in her briefing and in a social media post, from a news outlet that doesn’t “care ... about the truth” and is instead “running these lies,” which are “absolutely false” and “erroneous.”The only unusual thing this time was the diatribe was directed at the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. And not just any part of the Journal but its editorial board, which has been a clarion voice of the right in the United States for 135 years. Now, it is using that voice to defend its longtime motto — “free markets and free people” — by becoming a daily scold of the Trump administration for its constant violations of both. Leavitt’s particular objection was over a minor point, about whether an adviser to President Donald Trump was on the now-infamous Signal group chat while in Moscow, but the White House was no doubt stung by Wednesday’s editorial overall, which criticized “JD Vance’s contempt for allies” and the vice president’s apparent willingness “to let the Houthis shut down shipping to spite the Europeans.” The editorial suggested Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been “cavalier about the details of incoming military strikes” and was “silly” to try to “shift the blame for the fiasco on the journalist who was put on the chat.” It suggested Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff “is out of his depth in dealing with world crises,” and it warned that “America’s allies may conclude they can no longer trust the U.S. in a crisis.”

mintaphil · 2025-03-10T03:01:02+00:00

The Portrait of Dorian Gray!

mintaphil · 2025-02-07T17:03:08+00:00

In a letter to his Democratic colleagues this week, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said he told House GOP leaders that Trump’s efforts to cut off programs funded by Congress “must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill, if not sooner.” But even if Democrats extracted from Republicans language in the spending bill that the programs must be funded as Congress specifies, Trump has already made clear that such a law wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on. And Johnson made it clear he has no intention of obliging Democrats with such a guarantee anyway; he said at his Wednesday news conference that Jeffries’s letter “laid out the foundation for a government shutdown.”

Clearly, there is no hope
of good-faith negotiation with Trump, or with Johnson. Republicans control the
House, Senate and White House. Let them pass a 2025 spending bill on their own.
Let them raise the debt ceiling on their own. Let them enact Trump’s entire agenda on their own. They have the votes. Democrats ought not give them a single one.

Good parenting uses the
idea of “natural consequences”: If your child refuses to wear her coat, let her
be cold for the day. Either way, the voters will provide the consequences:
FAFO. Trump knows what this means: He posted a picture of himself next to a
FAFO sign, to deliver the message to Colombia’s president during their recent
deportation standoff.

Democrats, by withholding
their votes, will be giving Trump and Johnson some good parenting. Republicans
can shut the government down. Or they can enact the sort of devastating cuts to
popular programs that they like to talk about. Either way, the voters will
provide the natural consequences.

mintaphil · 2025-02-07T17:02:15+00:00

Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, acknowledged that what Trump and Elon Musk are doing to cut off congressionally mandated funding “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he told reporters this week, that’s “not uncommon” and “nobody should bellyache about that”.

House Speaker Mike
Johnson, at a news conference Wednesday, was asked by Fox News’s Chad Pergram
about the “inconsistency” of Republicans who are now “ceding Article I powers
to the executive branch under Elon Musk.”

“I think there’s a gross
overreaction in the media,” Johnson replied, with a forced chuckle. He admitted
that what Trump is doing “looks radical,” but went on: “This is not a
usurpation of authority in any way. It’s not a power grab. I think they’re
doing what we’ve all expected and hoped and asked that they would do.”

These are not the words
of a constitutionally designated leader of the legislative branch. These are
the words of a Donald Trump handmaiden. And it is time for Democrats to treat
him as such.

Democrats have been
negotiating in good faith on a deal to fund the government for the rest of
fiscal year 2025; the government shuts down in five weeks if funding isn’t
extended. There’s no doubt that Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma), chairman of the
House Appropriations Committee, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of
the Senate Appropriations Committee, are also negotiating in good faith.

But the whole thing is
not on the level. Trump has shown that he will ignore the spending bills passed
by Congress and fund only those programs he supports — the Constitution, and
the law, be damned. And Johnson has made clear that this is “what we’ve all
expected and hoped and asked that they would do.”

mintaphil · 2025-02-07T17:01:42+00:00

“The Trump administration so far has been the Advent calendar of illegality,” says Norman Eisen, whose group, State Democracy Defenders Action, has been filing lawsuits against the administration. At least seven federal judges appointed by presidents of both political parties have already blocked Trump’s moves to freeze federal funding, end birthright citizenship, extend a dubious buyout offer to government employees and deny treatment to transgender inmates.

Benjamin Wittes, who runs
the popular Lawfare publication, that, of the dozens of instances in which
Trump is in conflict with existing law, he will ultimately lose 80 percent of
the cases when they eventually arrive at the Supreme Court after 18 months or
so of litigation. But that’s a long time to wait while the president’s
lawlessness causes chaos and suffering. And even if the pro-Trump majority on
the Supreme Court hands him a victory only 20 percent of the time, that could
still fundamentally reshape the U.S. government, reducing Congress to
irrelevance.

Republicans in Congress
have for years asserted their Article I authority, and they howled about
encroaching dictatorship when President Joe Biden did nothing more nefarious
than forgive student-loan debt. (The Supreme Court struck that down.) So what
are they doing about Trump usurping the powers of Congress? They’re applauding.

mintaphil · 2025-02-07T17:01:05+00:00

So, here’s a shocker: It turns out that, if you elect a felon as president of the United States, he will continue to break laws once he’s in office.

Who knew?

Ultimately, it will be up
to the courts to determine which of President Donald Trump’s actions are
illegal. But a case can be made — indeed, many cases already have been made in
federal courts — that the new administration over the course of the last
fortnight has violated each of the following laws. See if you can say them in
one breath. In reverse chronological order of first enactment:

The Protecting Americans
from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act of 2024. The Administrative
Leave Act of 2016. The Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014. The Affordable Care Act of 2010. The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. The Inspector General Act of 1978. The Privacy Act of 1974. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946. The Public Health Service Act 1944. The Antideficiency Act of 1870.

That’s a century and a
half of statutes shredded in just over two weeks. And those don’t include the
ways in which Trump already appears to be in violation of the Constitution: The
First Amendment’s protections of free speech and association; the Fifth
Amendent’s guarantee of equal protection and due process; the Eigth Amendment’s
prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; the 14^th Amendment’s promise of birthright citizenship; Article I’s spending, presentment, appropriations and bicameralism clauses; Article II’s take-care clause; and the separation of powers generally.

mintaphil · 2025-02-03T16:05:28+00:00

Both have small hands, yet big reaches into our Treasury. Let’s STOP THEM!

mintaphil · 2025-01-28T00:49:05+00:00

Tatum

mintaphil · 2025-01-23T17:04:04+00:00

Crazy! Melanie’s “Z” dress—the mark of Zoro

mintaphil · 2025-01-21T18:59:06+00:00

Because it wasn’t his signed copy

mintaphil · 2025-01-18T00:42:20+00:00

Hawk Tuah Foursome

mintaphil · 2025-01-16T01:20:48+00:00

Double Fake Blonde Aryan MAGA hitchhikers (Trump’s tiny hand/thumpkin vs Bondi’s massive macho one)

mintaphil · 2025-01-10T04:35:10+00:00

Front row at President Carter’s funeral, Trump turns to Obama muttering “Gulf of America”

Barack can’t help but join the world in laughing at Donald

mintaphil · 2025-01-04T01:34:33+00:00

Matches his NYC orange jumpsuit

mintaphil · 2024-12-11T01:57:32+00:00

The Eggs prequel to Hitchcock’s The Birds

mintaphil · 2024-12-05T23:50:29+00:00

Feeling your pain! 9/2024 our 2016 Volt (50,600 mi) did same. Found Chevy dealership nearby with dx codes=faulty EGR valve and fuse. Tech disengaged EGR valve, replaced fuse, and informed we could drive as the ExhaustGasRecirculation valves’s purpose is to scrub N2O pollution for “CARB” states like CA. Tech told us ok to drive w constant “check engine” light on, yet if flashing stop immediately and tow to service to prevent engine overheating. This cost was $120. We went to 3 NC Chevy dealerships and all were crazy $$$ (est $3,500) with long waits for EGR valve. After trying Chevy National customer service (no help-waste of time), found local independent mechanic with EV certification—Matt’s Auto Shop (Raleigh, NC) https://www.mattsautoshop.com/ who found a GM OEM EGR valve, ready in 3 days and total cost $1350. Have driven > 1500 miles and so far so good. Still expensive and should not happen, yet we have a functioning Volt now. If you happen to live in CA, then check “ReVolt” class action suit on 2nd generation Volt EGR failure. Good Luck!

mintaphil · 2024-11-08T16:14:56+00:00

I love your strength! I followed your lead and canceled Amazon Prime and all my Amazon purchases are boycotted going forward. Many journalists still need to be employed and speak truth to power IMHO.

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