Six. Months.
That is how long since the Orange Guy moved back into the White House. 181 days. And let me tell you, it feels more like 181 years.
Reality started setting in pretty quick, especially since DOUCHE - oops, excuse me, DOGE - started doing their "job."
If you go back and read my last post, you remember that I predicted that Peach Pennywise's new Cabinet would break the government. I also said that DOGE would knock out the safety net. Unfortunately, I was dead right on both counts.
F*@% the poor!
They've gutted USAID, which among other things provided food to needy countries around the globe. Mango Mussolini insists that we give too much help to foreign countries, and that other countries need to shoulder more of the burden. To which I would reply with the words of both Jesus and Paul: "To whom much is given, from him much is required," and "Instruct those who are rich in this present world...to do good, to be generous and ready to share."
A truly evil thing I just found out is that there was an entire warehouse in Dubai where we were storing tons of high-energy biscuits, each of which could keep a starving person alive for a day. Taxpayer dollars had already paid for the food; it just needed to be delivered. But since USAID was no longer functional, the deliveries weren't happening.
The biscuits had an expiration date of sometime in July. But all the way back in March, several aid agencies from other countries sent word to the State Department (which presently has oversight of the agency), asking that they be allowed to distribute the food, since we weren't doing it. State did not respond, and remaining USAID employees were forbidden to communicate with the agencies. However, some smart, brave soul pointed out that it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars to let the food go to waste, so about 600 tons of the biscuits were able to be given to those agencies and delivered to the needy. But, that left nearly 500 tons. The expiration date passed, and that food was incinerated. Enough food to give 27,000 starving adults and children another month of life: Gone.
The administration played CYA by accusing President Biden of having ordered too much of the food; but there are always disasters that leave people without food. We could have found needy people to give it to; but Orange Chucky and his minions simply didn't want to.
Come fly with me...or maybe not...
The new Secretary of Transportation is, like all his fellow-clowns in the Clown-Car Cabinet, singularly unqualified for his job.
So what does he do once he's in, at the behest of DOGE?
He fires 400 FAA employees. Not air traffic controllers, true; but those controllers have backup staff, such as people who monitor weather conditions and people who create navigation maps of which planes are in the air and where they are in real time. With all the various flights all over the country, these maps are an absolute necessity to keep air traffic moving smoothly and safely. It's like knitting or crocheting, only with flight paths: Drop a stitch, and you get a tangled - and possibly crashed - mess.
COBOL lowball
DOGE also got its grubby little hands on the Social Security Association (which, as you may remember, is a big fat target for Project 2025). They fired a bunch of employees there, including telephone workers, which has a biiig impact on senior citizens who don't have Internet and/or can't get to an SSA office to conduct business...oh, and DOGE is closing many of those offices, too!
The Lone Muskrat and his gang of young programmers also got into the SSA database, and they thought they found a bombshell: A list of people born in the 1800's who were receiving Social Security benefits! Oh, and how the Orange Man chortled: Fraud!!! See, this is why we need these guys!
Except, it wasn't fraud at all. Dead people were not getting Social Security.
The SSA database was originally programmed in a computer language called COBOL. They were still teaching it when I was in college. It's a clunky language, but also very sturdy, and damn near unhackable.
When entering the data for people eligible for benefits, there were older rural folks for whom accurate birth records weren't available - like when a child was born at home with no doctor present, which happened even up into the 1940's. For those people, since a birth date had to be entered, they put in a random date in the 1850's, which was just code for "We don't have an accurate date for this person." That was all. When Orange Chucky began shouting about the so-called "fraud," a bunch of my-gen COBOL programmers jumped in and explained what was really going on.
But that didn't prevent some seniors from being cut off from their benefits because they had been declared "dead." And remember those fired phone workers, and those closed offices? That meant that restoring those benefits was astronomically harder. But that, in fact, is the point: The people in charge are hoping that senior citizens, disabled people, and the surviving spouses and children of deceased Social Security recipients (who are entitled to that person's remaining benefits - known as "survivor benefits") will just give up and crawl away to die.
Not likely. This is an issue that I expect people aren't going to give up on. Because we pay into that fund, and nobody - least of all some South African apartheid-lover and his wet-behind-the-ears crew that doesn't even understand one of the most foundational of programming languages - will be able to stifle our outrage!
The ICEmen cometh...
Of all the "promises" made by Velveeta Voldemort, the one about deporting "illegal immigrants" always sounded the scariest to me.
Unfortunately, it is also the one promise that is being kept to the letter.
Led by Kristi Noem (a former governor most famous for shooting a young "misbehaving" hunting dog and [for some unfathomable reason] a goat) and Stephen Miller (who looks like he was kicked out of the SS for excessive cruelty, and who was the author of the family-separation detention policy of Orange Chucky's first term), the DHS and ICE have begun rounding up people and detaining them in conditions that make "deplorable" sound like the Hilton. And it's not the drug dealers, human traffickers, and gangbangers who are getting caught - it's basically anybody who's brown, poor, and either speaks no English or does so with an accent. American citizens have also been rounded up and detained without due process or even access to an attorney; the standard accusation by ICE is that they "interfered" or "assaulted a federal agent."
The ultimate aim, of course, is to deport all these people en masse. But the Supreme Court has been on-again, off-again about it; at present, it's been mostly men deported, many of whom are not in any of the criminal categories that Don the Con insists they are. Many have no criminal record at all, either in the USA or their country of origin. And it's also children being captured, detained, and deported - some of them young American citizens born to immigrants, who are allowed no legal counsel at all.
And not just "illegals" - people who have residency permits, DACA recipients, and even naturalized immigrant citizens are all in the crosshairs. ICE is looking for any excuse, however flimsy, to get rid of them. Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, for example, was granted asylum from El Salvador. He came here in 2011 at the age of 16, trying to escape forced recruitment into Mara Salvatrucha, a.k.a. MS-13. Fast-forward to 2019, when an immigration judge granted him asylum and forbade him from being deported back to El Salvador. Fast-forward again to 2025, when ICE agents grabbed him, accused him of being part of MS-13, and sent him to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador! After a lot of legal butting of heads, Abrego-Garcia was finally returned to the States...but he is still being charged with...something.
This is all completely demonic, but it gets worse.
Peach Pennywise sent ICE into California to start raids in "sanctuary cities" and farms where people were picking crops, as well as construction sites, retail outlets, supply stores, and more. This was at the behest of Stephen Miller, who was mad that more people weren't being taken and who set a quota of 3,000 people per day. (A lot of ICE officials were dismayed by this - they had been concentrating on the gangbangers, human traffickers, and drug dealers. You know, the "bad people" PP kept yammering about.)
But they didn't stop there. When Californians took to the streets and protested, a few bad actors on one block got crazy, and local law enforcement got involved. Orange Chucky got cray-cray his own self and federalized the CA National Guard (without Governor Gavin Newsom's request or consent) to march in and "restore order." He also sent in some US Marines - an unprecedented use of the US military against US civilians, and highly unconstitutional.
But people continued to protest, especially when ICE began raiding farms. There has been one confirmed fatality in these raids: Jaime Alanís Garcia, who fell from a roof on the Glasshouse cannabis farm while trying to escape ICE agents. Protesters were also arrested for "assault" - throwing rocks at vehicles or tear gas canisters back at their original hurlers.
Kristi Noem insists that there were bad people on that farm, based on the discovery of unaccompanied minors working at Glasshouse; but if she really cared about children, she wouldn't be allowing ICE to capture and deport children at all.
And then there's Alligator Auschwitz.
Actually, Noem and her ICE goons call it "Alligator Alcatraz." It's located right in the middle of the Everglades, and it's basically a tent city with cages in it - thirty beds to a cage. Toilet and cleaning facilities are public and minimal (the sink sticks out from the side of the toilet, so that these guys are basically drinking and washing up in the same place where people are pooping...and if the toilet is standard prison issue, it has no lid, meaning that when flushed, waste particles are sprayed everywhere), food is meager and substandard (the staff get much more and better food), and the place is infested with bugs - grasshoppers and mosquitoes. the AC is intermittent at best. Oh, and it floods when it rains - imagine what's going to happen during a hurricane!
The people incarcerated there are supposed to be the "worst of the worst," but again, many have committed no crime, and some are not even "illegal." At this point, I am sure that Noem and the rest of them just don't care, as long as that "quota" is met.
Scariest of all, ICE are appearing as "anonymous" agents - no insignia, no names, wearing full military gear, weapons ready, and rousting their captives into unmarked vans with no license plates to take them to unknown places for detention. No contact with attorneys, no access to needed medication, and no answers for frantic family members. Oh, and no entry for Congressfolk who are supposed to have oversight over facilties in their district. This all screams "fascism" to a lot of sane folks.
And it's starting to at least whisper that to some MAGAs, too. I am seeing people who are astonished that their Dear Leader would be rounding up the people who pick the crops, milk the cows, put on roofs, clean up hotel rooms...all those heavy, hot, crap jobs that no one else will do. They're horrified that valued friends, significant others, and even relatives are being taken. They're realizing that it's going to affect food prices (which are already high) and cause labor shortages (because replacing trained employees is not the easy thing Dear Leader thinks it is) and cause trauma for their families and communities (because their disappeared people aren't "the bad ones").
Six months. And we're already on our way to becoming a fascist state that doesn't give two shits about its citizens. Can we recover from that? I think we can...but just remember what it took to get Germany back on track, once Hitler took power.
That's a hell of a price to pay.
