17Jul2025
Rally in honor of John “Good Trouble” Lewis. An inspiring hero for our times.
So how’s Trump doing at his second term’s first half-year mark? Ehh, not so hot! Overall approval rating is currently 40%, down a point from last month. Disapproval rating is 56%. His strongest issue is immigration, clocking in at 46% approval. Opinion on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has gone from mildly positive at +4 to negative at -3. At the same time, the budget for ICE in Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” was $170 billion. That’s supposed to last them until Septeber 2029. Marine Corps gets $54.96 billion for just until September 2026, so while the budget for ICE is pretty big, it doesn’t quite overshadow that for the Marine Corps.
Minnesota Governor Walz compared ICE to the Nazi Gestapo.
“They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared,”
The author of the piece that quoted Walz feels the comparison of ICE to the Gestapo is overreaching, and even comparing it to the Soviet KGB or Iran’s pre-revolutionary SAVAK is still overstating, but ICE certainly seems to be headed in that direction.
Does the Trump Administration take the job of seeing to the health and welfare of detainees seriously? Not according to the detainees of “Alligator Alcatraz,” who are in the 10th day of a hunger strike.
“Florida has struck an unholy bargain with the Trump administration,” one speaker said. “People are not getting food, hygiene, or medical care. These conditions are substandard and cause irreparable harm.”
Florida and its critics disagree over whether detainees have had access to legal counsel. Seems to me that should be an easily-verifiable claim.
Environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe asked [Judge] Williams to issue a preliminary injunction to halt operations and further construction at the center, arguing the center threatens environmentally sensitive wetlands that are home to protected plants and animals and would reverse billions of dollars’ worth of environmental restoration.
Tariffs are just now beginning to bite. As inventories of goods that were obtained under previous conditions are used up, now consumers have to pay the higher prices that Trump’s tariffs have now made necessary.
The economy created over 100k jobs a month for the first three months of the year. That’s a reasonably good rate. But the last three months? A total of only 35k net new jobs created. How do dictators classically respond to bad news?
Trump didn’t like what the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics said about the weakening, softening American economy, so Trump fired her.
Trump’s replacement for the Labor Statistics job: “With new labor statistics nominee, Trump heads in a radical and hazardous direction” Trump said his nominee E.J. Antoni, was “highly respected.” Erm, no. That’s not true.
Trump desperately tries to defend his tariffs from a strong legal challenge. “One year ago, the United States was a dead country” (actually, the economy was in very good shape), The US has deals worth “trillions” on the line (not advanced enough that they’re enforceable), “a forced dissolution of the agreements could lead to a 1929-style result.” (ha, ha! no, they won’t),
Problem is, other countries have figured Trump out. They’ve realized that the bottom-line figures of how much each nation benefits in actual value doesn’t matter to Trump.
A commitment to spend $250 billion per year on U.S. energy products would also require Europe to triple their annual American energy imports. “Question one is if they need that much, can afford that much,” Reinsch said. “Question two is if we can even supply that much.”
But what matters to Trump are the top-line boasting points. He can make wild claims that he’s achieved great deals.
We knew this from Trump’s first term. In December 2019, the US and China agreed that China would “buy $200 billion of additional U.S. energy by the end of 2021.” The actual exchange didn’t even come close to what China was buying in the first place. But Trump got his top-line bragging point! The numbers he was able to present were impressive.
Videos of rally
The US has long had a phenomenon where the right wing is very solidly pro-Israel, but where the left finds it increasingly difficult to defend things like Israel’s war on Gaza. The beginning of this particulaar war was horrific. Hamas invaded Israel from Northern Gaza, came upon a festival, and murdered many of the festival-goers. Then they took a whole group of hostages. Many of them were returned, some in body bags, but there are still some hostages remaining.
The murdering of Palestinian journalists is also one that separates right from left.
The Jeffrey Epstein crisis just may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. QAnon is trying to dampen down Trump’s role in Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring, but
QAnon is based on the wild idea that Trump is waging a war against a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping elites–primarily Democrats, celebrities, and globalists–who run the world and are embroiled in a global child sex trafficking ring.
So the problem now is to convince QAnon followers that Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring isn’t the same as the ring that QAnon has been trying to pretend is a real thing. Yeah, lots of luck with that!
Kate from Kharkiv is puzzled by Trump’s approach to Putin and peace. Trump appeared to be angry with Putin, but Putin said he wouldn’t budge, so Trump now supports Putin’s plan! Trump and Putin are going to be meeting in Alaska.
Trump is “bothered” by Zelenskyy:
I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, well, I have to get constitutional approval [to do any “land swaps”]. I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap because they’ll be some land swapping going on.
Uh, well, yeah. Ukraine’s President “got permission” to go to war with Russia because, y’know, Russia invaded Ukraine! It’s also far from clear how Russia is going to do any “land swaps” with Ukraine as Russia occupies 27% of Ukraine and Ukraine only occupies a tiny sliver of Russia. Ukraine has absolutely zero desire to occupy any Russian land. What exactly does Russia intend to give up in return for Ukrainian land?
Very clearly, the US needs more activism by citizens, more “Good Trouble,” more people actively protesting. US democracy has some bruises from being pushed around by a would-be dictator and needs to be revived. There continue to be signs of hope, a deeply Republican red district in California had its first town meeting with its Representative in eight years and hoo boy! Citizens were not happy with either Trump’s tariffs or with his immigration policies! Keep it up, y’all!
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