We need to talk about the rise of "smol bean fascism" where you have all the guns and the immunity but the really scary people are the ones with whistles and phone cameras and they're giving you generational trauma and ptsd by filming you killing people for no reason

Samuel Littauer @swlittauer X.com DC's cleaning crews cover around 81 miles/ day for around $150K/day. National Guard has cleaned a total of 3.2 miles and costs more than $1M/day. It's about 170X more cost efficient per mile to fund DC's existing work. AN Scott MacFarlane • @MacFarlan..•14h National Guard issues update on its deployment in Washington DC Including..: .. 9:47 AM • 9/2/25 • 568 Views 319 Samuel Littauer @swlittauer • 1h Per the FY26 budget, there are about 509 full-time staff on DPW's Public Space Cleaning Division. Total annual budget is around $55M (~$150K/day).

The National Guard cleaned DC streets and it only cost 170x what DC normally pays for the service! Meanwhile, Trump decimated the federal workforce to “save money.”

Days after Secretary Noem took office, she purported to "vacate" decisions by Secretary Mayorkas to extend TPS for Venezuela and Haiti — even though the law says repeatedly that TPS, once granted, lasts until it expires.

The 9th Circuit says she had no authority to do that.

New insights from video of an earlier incident involving one of Alex Pretti's shooters, the aggressor who started the incident that ended in Pretti's murder. That man ("A1", wearing identifier NS-919) wears a bodycam. And the new video shows his face. 1/

Definitely would bring up all the recorded times they said their putting bystanders in a database to track, and times they drove right to an observers home residence then stood outside it.

They could and did track him.

“The Border Patrol’s funding expanded as immigration and drugs became national issues. From 1994 to 2000, the number of agents more than doubled. Then it exploded. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Border Patrol repositioned itself as the front line against terrorist infiltrations…”

Apple Workers Are Livid That Tim Cook Saw “Melania” Movie Hours After CBP Killed Pretti Internal Slack logs shared with The Intercept show outrage over Cook’s coziness with Trump and Apple's silence on Pretti's death.

“This isn’t leadership. This is an absence of leadership,” an Apple employee said about CEO Tim Cook's latest capitulation: Attending a White House screening of Bezos-funded "Melania" on the night of Pretti's murder.

Read @theintercept.com on the staff rebellion at Apple:

ICE is upset that ICE isn't welcome in restaurants after ICE ordered food at a restaurant, ate it, then arrested restaurant employees, and ICE believes this is someone else's fault, do I have that right?

“Isolation is one of the key drivers of overdose fatalities, not necessarily overdoses, because people overdose and survive,” Prof. Leo Beletsky said. “Isolation in general is a major barrier to recovery, and that’s why connection is really key to people’s recovery process.”

ICE's decision to just leave cars abandoned in the roads is one of those dystopian things that makes you recoil in shock when you encounter it.

This has generally been the response whenever I've asked military people to review domestic police raids. But the stuff we're seeing from ICE and Border Patrol is especially bumbling and amateurish thuggery.

ICE’s excuse for wearing masks has never actually manifested There have been incidents of harassment and threats. But there are no apparent incidents in which identified ICE officers have been assaulted off-duty.

Finally got around to a bit of research I'd been meaning to explore, and: There is no documented instance of an ICE officer being identified and assaulted while off duty because he wasn't masked. www.pbump.net/o/ices-excus...

Once again, the New York Times is at its very best when it does not realize the moral or political implications of what it is saying.

That’s what it means to have the best reporters, the largest newsgathering budget, yet to be absolutely morally vacant at its core as an institution. No offense.

Here is some evidence from recent Politico reporting that Trump and his aides are pivoting on ICE because polls show Trump's agenda losing ground — especially with independents, young voters, and Hispanics www.politico.com/news/2026/01...

Every law enforcement agency in America knows how to manage the car after an arrest at a traffic stop. The Trump DHS leaves them open on the road like that to terrorize the rest of us. A nationwide policy.

Ethnic cleansing alert. Remember that these Haitians are here legally right now. They haven’t done anything wrong.

Gay ice hockey drama 'Heated Rivalry' becomes a surprise hit in Russia despite anti-LGBTQ+ laws The TV drama "Heated Rivalry" has become a global sensation, captivating audiences with its portrayal of a secret gay relationship between Canadian and Russian hockey players.

I guess soft power is producing...ummm...hard results.

Talking with Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty about Trump, Operation Metro Surge — and FAFO Watch now (47 mins) | "[T]he people of Minneapolis are looking around, and this is what they’re saying to their electeds too, is, ‘Who is here protecting us?’”

NEW: Regarding federal immigration agent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the nonfatal shooting this month, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told Law Dork: "I know enough now to feel pretty confident that we will be able to make a decision about charges in those three cases.”

You walk into this bar and show your ICE mugshot, you don't pay a dime.

WATCH-- Tim Walz on his call with Trump officials: "Not once did they ever say Alex or Renee's name. Not once did they ask how the people of Minnesota were doing. So look, I know who I'm dealing with, and I know the reason that he was calling me was he needed something from us."

I too love to cut my core business to prepare my factory for vaporware

I remember viewing Watchmen & thinking

wow

this is so UNREALISTIC

HUGE news! This is about a Trump admin effort to arrest thousands of screened and vetted refugees in Minnesota and fly them to Texas to be jailed and then interrogated.

After the interrogation is over, people are being dumped on the street and told to find their own way back.

JUST IN: Judge Schiltz cancels Friday’s contempt hearing but lights into ICE, saying the agency may have violated more court orders this month than many others have in their entire existence.

“ICE is not a law unto itself.”

Judge in Minnesota Says ICE Has Violated Nearly 100 Court Orders

The chief federal judge in Minnesota excoriated ICE on Wednesday, saying it had violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from its aggressive crackdown in the state and had disobeyed more judicial directives in January alone than “some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

Of the biggest scandals in US history just this week, I think I’d rank them:

1) Federal paramilitaries invade US city based on racist lies, murder US citizens

2) Slush fund for the president from stolen foreign resources held in Qatar

3) Whatever FBI and DNI are doing re: 2020 election in Georgia

As wild as this sounds, I really do think “president connected to notorious pedophile sex trafficker, corrupting law enforcement to cover it up, now in explicit violation of a specifically tailored law,” while easily impeachable in its own, is at most the fourth worst scandal this week.

Complaint Accuses Trump’s Criminal Attorney of “Blatant” Crypto Conflict in His Role at DOJ A watchdog group is seeking an inspector general investigation into Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche after ProPublica reported that he had ordered changes to crypto prosecutions while owning more ...

Following a ProPublica investigation, an ethics group filed a complaint alleging that Deputy AG Todd Blanche “blatantly and improperly influenced DOJ’s digital asset prosecution guidelines while standing to financially benefit.”

@cnn.com‘s @paulareidcnn.bsky.social scoop. Trump ordered Bondi to reopen a 2020 case Barr closed because there was NO evidence to sustained Trump’s #BigLie — they’re using this bullshit as pretext to steal private voter information data in a Democratic stronghold so they can cheat in 2026 midterm.

Best as I understand, Pam Bondi did not intervene in the case of a Jan6er, Christopher Moynihan, who threatened Hakeem Jeffries.

She has not intervened in case of Christian Joel Young, who assaulted Maxwell Frost.

But is intervening in the case Trump weighed in on, the Ilhan Omar attack.