Roaming Charges: What a Fool Believes

“On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.”

― Gore Vidal, Julian

+ Every pedestrian in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Portland has come closer to being run over by a car than that ICE agent in Mpls. None of them would have been legally justified in shooting the motorist.

Even here in our small neighborhood, on the rim of a canyon, nearly once a month in the pre-dawn darkness of our morning walks, Lola and I will have a close encounter with a speeding Amazon driver, blowing through all intersections to meet their hourly quotas, with their eyes focused on their digital map not the road, trying to locate the right house amid the tangle of Doug-firs and hemlocks to deliver some must-have-now parcel of deodorant, nail clippers and light bulbs. Corporate vehicular terrorism has suddenly become a daily hazard of American life that we are told we must endure under the merciless dictates of late capitalism. No shooting back will be tolerated. And if you get run down, it’ll be your fault for inconveniencing the speedy circulation of commodities. We’re all externalities of the profit motive: pedestrians, dogs and the stressed-out drivers themselves.

+ Meagan Day: “If Renee Good’s car posed an actual threat to Jonathan Ross’s life, he would be dead. We know this because shooting her in the face had no effect on the immediate course of the car.”

+ Kristi Noem: Renee Good had been harassing ICE “all day.” (Renee Good was murdered at 9:37 AM, shortly after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.)

+ It’s revolting, but hardly surprising, that a woman (Kristi Noem) who thought bragging about the time she shot her puppy in the head for disobeying a command and dumped its body in a gravel quarry would advance her political career, also thinks it’s entirely justified to shoot a mother of three in the head for “disobeying” confusing commands from her ICE agents.

+ Mike Fox: “The Minneapolis shooting shares characteristics with others the Wall Street Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire.”

+ Noah Levy is a Minneapolis-based drummer, plays in the Brian Setzer Orchestra and Zeppo…

+ How to tell if you’re living in a police state: there are currently more than TWICE as many federal agents (3000) in Minneapolis as there are city cops, county sheriff’s deputies and state police (1400).

+ Trump has sent 13.6% of all ICE agents to Minneapolis, a city that represents .13% of the population of the United States.

+ A big reason CBP issued policies instructing officers not to stand in front of vehicles is that internal reports showed that CBP officers were deliberately doing so to have an excuse to open fire.

+ Pablo Maniquez: “REMINDER that no ICE agent has EVER been killed in the line of duty OR been convicted of a crime for shooting someone … meaning their victimhood narrative is a hoax, as is any public accountability for agents.”

+ Rep. Angie Craig, on being denied entry along with Ilhan Omar, into ICE’s Minneapolis detention center: “We were told because this facility is being funded by the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ not the congressional appropriations act, that we would not be allowed to enter the facility. That’s complete nonsense … I informed them they were violating the law. They said they didn’t care.”

+ When an exasperated Adam Tooze said this about the Democrats, he wasn’t referring to this insipid statement from Tim Walz, but he might as well have been…

You people are a bunch of sentimental schmucks who don’t understand that you lost. If you had any self-respect, you would not be on any podium again, ever, sounding off about anything. Because, comrades, if we were in the 30s, I would have taken you out and shot you. You fail like this, you don’t get to come back and show off your wounds.

+ ICE agents in Minnesota have been offering protesters they’ve arrested cash in exchange for providing the names of protest organizers and undocumented people. 

+ So the Trump/Bondi Department of Vindictive Prosecutions is going after Renee Good’s widow, a move that prompted six seasoned federal prosecutors in the office to resign in protest. What next, will Kristi “the Puppy Killer” Noem order one of her ICE agents to shoot Good’s dog?

+ For the first time, a poll (The Economist) shows a plurality of Americans support abolishing ICE…

46% support abolishing ICE
43% oppose abolishing ICE

+ The same poll shows that 60% of Americans support “criminally prosecuting any ICE agent who kills someone.”

+++

+ ICE went into a Target, where they snatched a 17-year-old  worker from his job, threw him to the ground outside the entry and cuffed him, as he kept telling them he was a US citizen.  Twenty minutes later or so, after confirming that the teenager was in fact a US citizen, they dumped him in the parking lot of a Walmart a mile away, where people found him bleeding and crying: “They slammed me on the ground.”

+ During a protest in Santa Ana, California, last week, Kaden Rummler was shot in the face at close range by an ICE agent with a “non-lethal” round that left the 21-year-old blind and with a fractured skull and a piece of metal lodged in his throat, only seven millimeters from his carotid artery. 

Videos of the shooting show the ICE agent firing his weapon into a crowd of people at a few feet away, who were protesting the shooting of Renee Good outside of the Santa Ana Federal Building.  Bullets hit a woman in the leg and Rummler in the face. The agent appeared to aim at Rummler’s head.

After being shot, Rummler collapses to the pavement, hands to his face. The ICE man who shot him grabs the hood of Rummler’s jacket and drags him across the ground. As the hood tightens around his throat, Rummler heaves for breath. It looks like he’s being strangled. Blood seeps from his left eye, which has been permanently damaged by shards of plastic, metal and glass. Other ICE officers start firing pepper balls at a man’s throat and head as he tries to film the encounter with his cell phone.

Inside the building, the ICE shooter leaves Rummler on the ground, still bleeding. Two agents press his face down into the pool of blood. One agent hisses: “You’re going to lose your eye.” They wait several minutes before calling paramedics. 

What set the ICE officers off on this rampage? Someone tossed an orange traffic cone in their direction. 

Meanwhile, Rummler is lucky to be alive. After six hours in surgery, doctors saved his eye, but it will be permanently blind. The surgeons didn’t remove the shard of metal from his neck, fearing it might sever his carotid artery and cause him to bleed to death.

“That could have cost him his life,” his aunt Jeri Rees told the Los Angeles Times. “But now, for the next six weeks, he can’t sneeze or cough because it could do a lot of damage.”

After being released from the hospital, Rummler told a local TV station, “I will be blind for life. I have fractures in my skull that they can’t fix. They pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel out of my eye. I had shards of metal, glass, and plastic behind my eye and in my skull. They said it was a miracle I survived.”

+++

+ It was only a day after an ICE officer murdered Renee Good, when six Border Patrol officers patrolling east Portland in four separate vehicles for some as yet unexplained reason began tailing a red Toyota Tacoma pickup truck, eventually pulling it over into the parking lot of a medical center. 

There’s no indication that the driver of the truck had committed any moving violations and Border Patrol doesn’t enforce Oregon traffic laws in any event. The Tacoma hadn’t been reported stolen. Neither of the occupants of the truck was the registered owner, so there’s no way Border Patrol could know for sure who they were stopping. They were simply two Hispanic-looking people, a man and a woman, in a Toyota truck. The agents didn’t have a warrant and had no probable cause for the stop. It was another case of racial profiling, a so-called Kavanaugh stop, after the Supreme Court justice who said such incidents amount to only a minor inconvenience. In this instance, it led to a married couple being shot. 

The Border Patrol agents parked their unmarked vehicles around the Tacoma, attempting to box in the truck, a common tactic that has given immigration agents an excuse to escalate if a confrontation ensues. 

The six agents got out of their vehicles and approached the truck with their guns drawn, pointing to the ground, according to an FBI document. One of the Border Patrol officers later said the driver of the truck, later identified as Luis Nino-Moncada, looked “anxious and [was] visibly moving around in the driver’s seat.” And who wouldn’t be “anxious,” a mere day after Renee Good was shot in the face by an ICE officer in similar circumstances. And it turned out that Nino-Moncada had good reason to be fearful.

According to depositions from several of the Border Patrol officers taken by the FBI, several agents ordered Nino-Moncada and his wife, Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras, to get out of the truck. Instead, Nino-Moncada put the Tacoma in reverse, hitting one of the Border Patrol vehicles. Then he moved forward, backed up again and tried to angle his way forward out of the box the Border Patrol vehicles had placed him in. At that point, one of the Border Patrol officers fired several shots into the driver’s side window. I repeat: the side window. Nino-Moncada was hit twice: once in the arm and once in the leg, while Zambrano-Contreras sustained a more serious bullet wound to the chest. 

Even though wounded, Nino-Moncada was able to maneuver the Tacoma past the armed agents and their cars. He drove more than eight miles to an apartment complex in Northeast Portland, where the couple sometimes stayed. How he was able to elude Border Patrol’s finest and their six vehicles is something of a mystery. With both Nino-Moncada and his wife bleeding profusely, he called 9-11, not the normal response of a hardened gang member, as he was later accused of being. 

Portland Police and paramedics arrived and transported the couple to the hospital. While paramedics applied a tourniquet to the bullet wound on his arm, reportedly said, “Fuck ICE” several times. Though this statement would later be used against him as evidence of animus toward immigration agents, he would hardly be alone in harboring this sentiment, especially after they’d just shot him and his wife for little to no reason. 

No Border Patrol agents were injured in this bizarre incident. The wounds suffered by the Feds were to one of their cars, which FBI agent Daniel Jeffreys said sustained “significant damage,” though the photo of the Tacoma released in the charging documents shows a pristine-looking vehicle, which is a pretty good advertisement for the durability of a Toyota truck.

The Border Patrol agent, however, told the FBI investigators a now familiar refrain: he feared that Nino-Moncado might hit them with his truck. Might. Of course, he didn’t run them over or even nudge them, even after one of the agents had tried to kill him and his wife. 

As soon as Border Patrol learned of the couple’s whereabouts in the hospital, the federal agents showed up and took them into custody. Zambrano-Contreras was transferred to the ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington and later charges were filed against her in the Western District of Texas. Nino-Moncada was held in Portland, awaiting federal charges for “aggravated assault” on federal officers.

But before the couple had even been identified in the press, the smearing began. DHS took to social media to celebrate the shooting and arrest of Nino-Moncacdo and Zambrano-Contreras, claiming they were domestic terrorists and members of the Tren de Aragua gang. A day later, DHS revised its assessment downward, claiming that the couple were “suspected gang members,” but still offered no proof for the allegation.  

Then Pam Bondi asserted herself into the mix, revising the unsubstantiated smear that the couple for TdA gang members: “Anyone who crosses the red line of assaulting law enforcement will be met with the full force of this Justice Department. This man – an illegal alien with ties to a foreign terrorist organization – should NEVER have been in our country to begin with, and we will ensure he NEVER walks free in America again.”

Portland Police Chief Bob Day appeared to give Bondi’s allegations some limited support when he said that the couple had been in a “nexus of association” with suspected TdA gang members. But the nexus was pretty nebulous by Day’s own admission. Through the investigation of the shooting on July 11, there became a nexus to them. Whether they were involved, I do not know. As far as I am aware, they haven’t been named as, you know, suspects.”

What’s it all about? Last summer, Zambrano-Contreras apparently agreed to have sex with a Portland man who ended up forcing her to perform oral sex on him, attempted to strangle her and then stole her money and purse. She called friends to help her get her money and belongings back. One of the friends, a man known as “Alex”, got into an altercation at the apartment and apparently, a shot was fired and the bullet casing was matched to another shooting. There’s no evidence as to who fired the shot or whether the casing was from that shooting. 

“The shooting of Mr. Moncada by federal officers and the subsequent accusations leveled against the victim of that shooting follow a well-worn playbook that the government has developed to justify the dangerous and unprofessional conduct of its agents,”  said Fidel Cassino Du-Clou, the Oregon Federal Public Defender representing Nino-Moncada. “The federal government has claimed without evidence that he is a member of Tren de Aragua, just as they have many other Venezuelan citizens.”

The only people injured in this entire affair were Nino-Camara and Zambrano-Contreras. Yet, they’re the ones recuperating from bullet wounds in federal custody, smeared as terrorists.

+++

+ This week, ICE arrested Rafael Andres Rubio Bohorquez at his scheduled immigration appointment. Rubio Bohorquez is an employee of the New York City Council. He has no criminal record and has authorization to work in the U.S.

+ A Portland cop has been reassigned after he told protesters that he would have shot Renee Good, too.

+ The swelling legions of ICE have largely replaced the National Guard, which, even under the command of Pete Hegseth, still proved too woke to engage in the kind of daily acts of unprovoked violence against civilians in American cities that Trump and Miller want to watch videos of on Fox News.

+ An investigation by Pro Publica found that federal immigration agents have used banned chokeholds and other tactics that restrict breathing in more than 40 instances. Even though there’s a federal ban on these methods of restraint, none of the officers who have used them have been punished. These torture techniques have even been deployed against children. “I felt like I was going to pass out and die,” said a 16-year-old boy. He is a US citizen, not that it really matters.

+ Kristen Welker: Did you keep $50,000, or did you return it?

Thomas Homan: I did nothing illegal

Welker: Was there $50,000 in the bag?

Homan: This is an attack on my integrity and I’m not addressing it

Welker: Did you return the money?

Homan: I didn’t have any money to return

Welker: Would you be comfortable releasing the recordings?

Homan: I’m not going to get ahead of their investigation

+ Border Patrol prima donna Gregory Bovino on the ICE protesters in Minnesota:  “We have members of the community, some of the weaker-minded constituents that fall victim to Tim Walz and Jacob Frey’s rhetoric coming against us.” “Weaker-minded”? How about “strong moral constitution,” “exceptional bravery in the face of armed, masked, violence-prone thugs,” “compassionate and empathetic,” “defenders of the Constitution’s core principles.”

+ Joe Rogan: “Now ICE are villains, and people are looking at them like murderous military people that are on the streets of our cities and they’re masked up, which is a problem….You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people, many of which turn out to be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them. Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”

+ ICE sent a job offer to Laura Jadeed even though she didn’t submit or sign any paperwork, disdains the Trump administration and would have failed a drug test by her own admission.

+ The Intercept reported that after the killing of Renee Good, Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security began using a Neo-Nazi anthem ( “We’ll Have Our Home Again”) in its recruitment drive to attract more right-wing thugs, from outfits like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, to enlist in ICE. It won’t be long before they can proudly drop the “Neo-“

+ Welcome to Philip K. Dick’s nightmare world…Do MAGA rank-and-file really believe this technology of mass surveillance and death from above won’t eventually, probably immediately, be used against them? If so, their paranoia antennae have dulled considerably in the last year…

+ Is anyone really considering traveling to the US for the World Cup? Trump, the FIFA Peace Prize winner, just imposed a visa ban on 70 FIFA countries, including 5-time World Cup Champion Brazil, 2-time World Cup Champion Uruguay, 11th-ranked Morocco, 15th-ranked Colombia, 19-ranked Senegal, 20th-ranked Iran, 33rd-ranked Russian and 35th-ranked Egypt, Africa’s oldest FIFA member.

+ Daniel Koh: “Trump has now spent $30 billion from the last bill for 10,000 more I.C.E. Agents that are going to be on the streets. I find it ironic that we’re having this conversation amidst the health care debate—that $30 billion would cover all the ACA subsidies for a year. It would eliminate all co-pays for prescription drugs for people for a year, and eliminate all medical debt.  It’s like he’s making it easier to kill people than to keep people alive.”

+++

+ The September 2, 2025, double-tap attack on an alleged “drug boat” off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, where a second strike was ordered to kill survivors clinging to the wreckage, involved multiple war crimes. This week, the New York Times reported that the plane used in the strike was disguised to look like a commercial jetliner, likely a 737 that had been modified to fire missiles. If so, this amounts to the crime of “perfidy,” where military hardware is modified to make it appear innocuous in order to mount a surprise attack. Perfidy is a crime under both international and US law. In fact, the US charged an accused al-Qaeda militant held at Guantanamo with the crime of perfidy in the attack on the USS Cole, where the accused and his colleagues had allegedly made friendly gestures from a small boat, which secretly carried the bomb that blew a hole in the guided-missile destroyer, while docked for refueling in Aden, Yemen. The blast killed 17 sailors and wounded 37 more.

+ Cost of the US naval blockade of Venezuela: $9 million a day, totaling $700 million to date.

+ There have now been at least 30 US missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and western Pacific Ocean, killing 123 people. Still no proof that any of these boats have been hauling drugs or that they were bound for the US.

+ Sen. Marc Kelly on Pete Hegseth’s attempt to demote him and seize his pension over Kelly’s participation in a video urging US troops not to obey illegal orders: “[Hegseth’s] unconstitutional crusade against me sends a chilling message to every retired member of the military: if you speak out and say something that the President or Secretary of Defense doesn’t like, you will be censured, threatened with demotion, or even prosecuted.”

+ In a Truth Social post, Trump declared himself the “acting president” of Venezuela…Maybe, in the ultimate act of hubris, he’ll launch airstrikes against himself.

+ Rep. Thomas Massie on the Republicans who switched their vote at the last minute under pressure from the Trump White House to kill the Senate resolution invoking the War Powers Act on Venezuela:

It’s shameful that senators in safe seats can’t stand up to the political pressure of this President and his henchmen, even when they know what’s in the best interests of the United States and what their oath to the Constitution requires of them. Ambition is their downfall.

+ The farcical justification from the GOP senators? US military forces are not engaged in hostilities with Venezuela. Tell it to the more than 100 killed in Venezuela during the Maduro kidnapping and 123 people killed in ongoing US airstrikes on small boats in the Caribbean. 

+ Trump on his scheme for the conquest of Greenland: “The United States needs Greenland for the purpose of National Security. It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building. NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES. Anything less than that is unacceptable.”

+ Trump is considering paying every Greenlander $10,000 to $100,000 if they’ll vote to secede from Denmark.

+ Jeffrey Epstein polls higher than taking Greenland by force:

Oppose: 68%
Support: 8%

+ Buying Greenland would cost more than $700 billion, if the seller were willing (the seller isn’t).

+ Where do I enlist?

+ Nikhil Pal Singh, writing in Equator: “Trump’s real innovation has been to marry the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors. What distinguishes his latest regime in its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it “Homeland Empire.”

+ Journalists applying for positions at Stripes and Stripes are being asked if they’re loyal to Trump.

+ Department of War’s press release on imposing a loyalty oath for Stars and Stripes journalists and transforming the news outlet into a propaganda mill for Hegseth: 

The Department of War is returning Stars & Stripes to its original mission: reporting for our warfighters. 

We are bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century. We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members.

Stars & Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters. It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.

Stars & Stripes has a proud legacy of reporting news that’s important to our service members. The Department of War is committed to ensuring the outlet continues to reflect that proud legacy.

+ Trump says he’s considering airstrikes on Iran for cracking down on protesters who are expressing their outrage in some cases by burning buildings in Tehran and other cities, which is the same response Trump had against BLM protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and anti-ICE protesters after the murder of Renee Good.

+ From Dexter Filkins’ profile of Marco Rubio in the New Yorker: “(Ordinarily, he would be considered) the most powerful American diplomat since Henry Kissinger. And yet, by comparison, Rubio seems less like a foreign-policy advisor and more ‘like a support staffer for the president. Ultimately, he has to be 100 percent loyal to the President and the President zigs and zags, Rubio has to zig and zag with him,’ a former Western diplomat who’s worked with Rubio said.”

+ Jake Johnston: “There are more people displaced right now in Haiti than there were in the aftermath of the earthquake that hit the country 16 years ago today. Armed group violence may be the most proximate cause, but the failure of the US-led reconstruction led to this. “

+ Greg Grandin: “Journalists should stop referring to Milei as a “true believer” or a “libertarian.”  He just greatly fortified the power of the country’s surveillance state and gave its agents authority to detain without cause.”

+++

+ In 2025, greenhouse emissions increased (by 2.4%) in the US for the first time in more than two years. In fact, greenhouse gas emissions grew faster than the US economy, which might be the best metaphor yet for the entire Trump administration.

+ Not only have the last three years been the hottest on record, but they’re also the first three-year period where the average global temperature topped 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

+ While last year was “only” the third hottest year on record, largely thanks to the cooling effect of La Niña, it was the warmest year ever recorded in Antarctic and sea ice in both polar oceans hit new lows.

+ Dreame, an 8-year-old Chinese firm known for its robot vacuum manufacturing, debuted a 1,876-horsepower EV called the Kosmera Nebula 1 that is capable of accelerating from 0-60 in 2 seconds.  

+ For the first time, coal generation in both China and India declined in the same year…

Coal down 3% in India in 2025
Coal down 1.6% in China in 2025

+ Paltry winter snows have left the Himalayas “bare and rocky,” an ominous sign for the water flows of the subcontinent’s major rivers.

+ Some of you may remember the case of Cody Roberts, the Wyoming man who chased and ran over a wolf with his snowmobile, captured the wounded animal, duct-taped its mouth shut, dragged it into a bar where it was tortured, then took it outside and shot it. Now three more Wyoming men are facing trial for roping a sick, one-eyed female moose, then riding the wild animal and digging spurs into its side until it died. Another recent case of animal abuse in the Cowboy state involves a man who allegedly ran down and killed a wild horse with his four-wheeler. The backlash to these cases, even in the gun-happy state of Wyoming, has been fierce. “This is not the Wyoming way, not the cowboy way,” said Paul Ulrich, president of Wyoming Sportsmanship. “The stewardship of our wildlife is something we cannot take lightly.” Still, you’ve got to wonder what’s in the water out there. Fracking fluid, I guess…

+ Nature’s annual ranking of universities in the fields of applied sciences and scientific research shows China enjoying whole spectrum dominance in the field, with 13 of the top 20 institutions…

+ Some good news: The number of wildfires in the Brazilian Amazon declined by 69% in 2025, dropping to the lowest level in 28 years, according to EFE Verde. The decline was “attributed by specialists to less severe climatic conditions than in 2024 [and] to shorter and less rigorous periods of drought.”

+ Here’s a trailer for Waling Bear Comes Home, a documentary on Chuck Jonkel, one of the greatest wildlife biologists of our time or any time. Chuck was a true field biologist who developed his theories through extended observation. I spent a day with him in Yellowstone back in the early 90s, shortly after coming to Oregon to edit the seminal (if I may say so) environmental journal ForestWatch, and learned more about grizzlies in a few hours than I have over the next 30 years.

+++

+ The GOP bill to abolish the estate tax would cost more than $281 billion over the next 10 years. If passed, it would give:

$3.3 trillion to 935 billionaire families
$291 billion to Musk’s family
$190 billion to the Walton family
$0 to family farms
$0 to the 99.9%

+ During Trump’s first year in office, the wealth of America’s billionaires increased by 22%, making them 1.5 trillion dollars richer than they were last year. 

+ Trump:  “Grocery prices are starting to go rapidly down. Rent is down. Airfares are down. Hotel rates are down. Cell phone prices are down.” Checks receipts. Nah…

+ A new study from the Brookings Institution warns that the mass deportation of immigrants and closed borders have inflicted serious damage on the US economy: “Net migration was likely close to zero or negative over calendar year 2025 for the first time in at least half a century. The slowdown implies weaker employment, GDP, and consumer spending growth.”

+ The cost of a house is now 150% higher than it was in 2019, making home ownership out of reach for about 75% of U.S. families, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

+ On Trump’s handling of the economy:

Approve: 20%
Disapprove: 63%
Don’t know: 17%

YouGov/Economist

+ Gavin Newsom wants to lead the Resistance. Resistance to what has always been the question…and we may finally have an answer.

+ Elizabeth Warren on “Abundance”: “When this agenda is about making government more effective, count me in… Instead, Abundance has become a rallying cry for wealthy donors and other corporate Dems who are putting big-time muscle behind making Dems more favorable to big business.” Same old story since the founding of the DLC in the mid-80s and the rise of the New Democrats under Clinton and Gore.

+ The Mamdani Administration just issued a report charging that delivery apps, like DoorDash and Uber Eats, filched $550 million from workers by hiding the option to give a tip. The average tip on DoorDash and UberEats is just 76 cents for each delivery. But the average tip on apps that offer a tip option is $2.17.

+++

+ Nearly a full-month has elapsed since the statutory deadline for the full release of the Epstein files to Congress. So far, less than 1% of the documents have been released. It’s been two weeks since the statutory deadline expired for the Justice Department to explain to Congress the reason for any redactions. Trump’s crew has missed that deadline as well.

+ Sam Youngman (former White House correspondent): “The New York Times had two hours with Trump. They didn’t ask about Epstein, but they did ask which parts of the job he hates. Then they took a tour of the White House.  Thank god for the watchdogs.”

+ A fundraiser for Ford factory worker TJ Sabula, the man who was suspended from his job for calling Donald Trump a “pedophile protector,” raised more than $222,000 in just a few hours. Sabula says he has no regrets about the confrontation with Trump, who responded to the UAW member in his customary manner by snarling “Fuck off” and flipping him the bird.

+++

+ 100+: number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since the Trump-brokered “ceasefire.”

+ For two years, Ursula von der Leyen cheered on a genocide, now she’s “horrified”…

+ Jewish students and faculty at Penn University have condemned Trump’s demand that his alma mater turn over to his Department of Vindictive Prosecutions a list of Jewish students and organizations.

+ Iranian director and dissident Jafar Panahi supports the Iranian protests, skeptical about outside intervention (which is, of course, the principled stand all of us should take): “Until people have the will to change something from within, nothing will be able to make that change. It has to be by the will of the people from within.”

+ In an affidavit submitted to Israel’s Supreme Court, the Netanyahu government accused the Israeli daily Haaretz of “supporting the enemy in wartime.” Citing its reporting on Gaza, the government accused Haaretz of “defaming the state and the Zionist enterprise as a whole.”

+++

Tony Dokoupil, the weepy new anchor of CBS News, hand-picked by Bari Weiss, got dunked on by Trump, who made clear who his TV daddy was…

DOKOUPIL: When I travel the country, they tell me they don’t feel it[a roaring economy] because grocery prices are up–

TRUMP: They’re going to now. I’ve only been here for 11 months. I inherited a mess. If she got in, you wouldn’t have this job right now.

Over to you, Joe Walsh…

And every Saturday we work in the yard
Pick up the dog do
Hope that it’s hard (whaf whaf)
Take out the garbage and clean out the garage
My friend’s got a Chrysler
I’ve got a Dodge
We’re just ordinary average guys

+ Rulings in favor of Trump polices by federal judges…

Trump appointees: 92%
Other GOP appointees: 68%
Democratic appointees: 27%

They’ll be around decades after he’s gone.

+ Trump has apparently just ended his 9th war, a war so covert that I was unaware we’d been waging it…

+ Verso has just reprinted Juliet Mitchell’s classic text Psychoanalysis and Feminism. She and Cockburn were at Oxford at the same time. She married Alex’s close friend Perry Anderson and was on the board of the New Left Review for many years. I love this anecdote she tells about being kicked out of a Scottish bookstore for trying to buy pornography when she asked for a copy of The Second Sex:

I would date the beginning of Woman’s Estate to a camping holiday with the same Brighton/Oxford boyfriend, on the wonderful but oh so wet west coast of Scotland in the so-called ‘summer’ 1959 or 1960. Interested by then in existentialism (not women), I was escorted out of a bookshop in Oban as though I had asked for pornography when I tried to buy The Second Sex. I remember when I finally read it back at college, as well as being hugely impressed at its range, depth, and sweep, I had, from my gender naïveté, a silly thought: maybe it’s as bad as that for women in France, but surely not in England! The germs of wanting to find out more were taking root. De Beauvoir has always remained very important for me and I am immeasurably proud to feature in her autobiography as the young English woman who changed her mind about psychoanalysis!

+ Joyce Carol Oates is throwing lightning bolts:

“So, the drill is: ICE shouts contradictory orders; you try to follow one of these orders; you are shot dead & denounced by the US government as a ‘domestic terrorist.’ Quite a future for America’s youth to look forward to.”

“They began the Civil War with little notice: except it’s the US government with an anonymous ICE army waging warfare on citizens. Focus now is on brown- & Black-skinned persons in Minneapolis & their white defenders/friends (like Rene Good); but will probably soon spread, with new ICE agents swarming into urban areas in Democratic states. In this Civil War, ICE has all the weapons & the “law” on its side; the rest of us, unarmed, unorganized, unprepared, quixotically committed to US laws.”

+ It’s truly amazing how Oates can write three novels a year, teach a master class in reading difficult books and another in writing them and still remain fully engaged in the deteriorating politics of our country. I don’t always agree with her assessments, but I admire her deeply.

+ What fresh hell is this? Can there be any doubt that Papa would’ve unloaded both barrels on this monstrosity before turning his W. & C. Scott & Son long-range pigeon gun on his own tortured self?

+ The late Tom Verlaine’s massive book collection included The Politics of Antisemitism by Cockburn and St. Clair…

+ I thought all Barbies were by definition autistic…

+ Polymarket called the 26/28 Golden Globe winners right. Move over, Nate Silver!

+ You’ve gotta love Bobby Seale: “I’d have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I’d just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.”

+ Shortly after Roger McGuinn heard Tom Petty’s American Girl (the last song Petty played live with Heartbreakers) for the first time, the stylistic debt to The Byrds’ sound was so strong that he called up his manager and asked, “When did I write that song?” McGuinn later recorded his own (inferior) version.

+ Despite two years of attempted indoctrination from my best friend in college, I never became a big fan of the Dead, though Bob Weir’s Cassidy is a pretty good song by almost any standard and even better if you’d read On the Road or Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. A decade or so later, I had a pleasant encounter with Weir when he cycled across the Northern Rockies in support of grizzlies, wolves and wilderness. He seemed committed, funny, even goofy, and in a lot better shape than Jerry Garcia….

Fare-thee-well now
Let your life proceed by its own design
Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine
Fare-thee-well now
Let your life proceed by its own design
Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine
Flight of the seabirds, scattered like lost words
Wheel to the storm and fly

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions
Behrooz Ghamari
(OR Books)

Following the Bend: How to Read a River and Understand Its Nature
Ellen Wohl
(Princeton)

The Homegrown City: Reclaiming the Metropolis for Its Users
Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Thereupon
Fieldwork
(Pi)

Secret Love
Dry Cleaning
(4AD)

House Party
Jimmy Smith
(Blue Note, Classic Vinyl Series)

An Animal Gnawing From Within

“Identifications with dogs, or possession by dogs who themselves are good imitators, have featured in descriptions of hysteria since the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greek hysteric experienced her body as being filled with an uncontrollable rampaging, like an animal gnawing her from within (which is quite a good description of uncontrollable desire). Her body was experienced or described as occupied by a wild dog.”

– Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusa, Reclaiming Hysteria

The post Roaming Charges: What a Fool Believes appeared first on CounterPunch.org.