The Saddest of Ferris Wheels - American Politics, July 2026

Here we go, 250 more!!

https://www.wlky.com/article/mitch-mcconnell-hospital-condition-louisville-kentucky/71768553

https://newrepublic.com/post/212595/mitch-mcconnell-found-unconscious-rushed-hospital

I managed to miss this back on June 14. And the Washington Post was already dead to me, but...way to piss on the Watergate legacy, Bezos!

From the old thread

Tomorrow we can open a new thread. If only it were as easy to move past the shitstorm called the Trump Administration, the 119th Congress, and the Supreme Court.

In Indian traditions, Saṃsāra refers to the cycle of life, suffering, death, and rebirth, from which we are all trying to escape. It is compared to a "cycle of aimless drifting, wandering or mundane existence."

Saṃsāra is contrasted with nirvana, a state of bliss in which the enlightened soul gains release from the cycle of torment that imprisons most of us.

It is often depicted, in religious imagery, as a wheel.

Rather like, dare I say, a Ferris wheel.

was inspired by this headline: A storm, overpriced food and a sad ferris wheel: inside Trump’s dreadful state fair

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/01/donald-trump-great-american-state-fair

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFx298i-FOc

https://preview.redd.it/i-thought-this-was-a-ferris-wheel-for-years-just-now-v0-pacxk64altbg1.jpeg

how is this gonna work... they can't just admit they lost

The Justice Department on Tuesday directed its staff to bring fraud charges in alleged cases of birth tourism as a response to their loss in the birthright citizenship ruling from the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

In the wake of the 6-3 ruling, a memo from the Justice Department’s office of the deputy attorney general said all criminal division staff should “prioritize the investigation and prosecution of birth tourism schemes.”

Don't there have to be laws against "birth tourism" before you can prosecute them?

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1812

S.1812 - Ban Birth Tourism Act 119th Congress (2025-2026)

Sponsor: Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN] (Introduced 05/20/2025)
Committees: Senate - Judiciary
Latest Action: Senate - 05/20/2025 Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Doesn't seem to have passed

the golden boy brett kavanaugh will be pleased to revisit!

There are.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/birth-tourism-trump

I did hear about a place in Southern California where they were doing this (mostly women from China) but it was for a weird reason: so their kids could pay resident tuition at colleges! Like in 18 years... pretty crazy foresight

That should have said xp, but there are statutes in place that the government has used to prosecute “birth tourism.”

We should all go to the Dallas GOP convention in Sept... I don't think you have to be a delegate, you can just get your freak on

I don't want to get my hopes up, but an 80 year old man with numerous documented health problems and many secret health problems is promising to give a two-hour speech in 107 degree heat next week...

if it happens on July 4th the world may run out of fireworks

ive still never heard how citizenship would be determined birthright is dead but then i’ve not read much about it. anyone know)

https://medium.com/prismnpen/to-the-trans-girl-who-just-lost-at-the-supreme-court-so-did-i-26-years-ago-cb1603082d46

More of this please:

Dave Weigel: “When Fox News is booking you and covering you, might that be for the same reason Republican PACs spend to help progressive candidates? That they see you as easier to beat?”

Abdul El-Sayed: “It’s amazing to me how deeply they’re misjudging this. I’m like: You have never fought a counterpuncher. The number of times I’m gonna define and redefine Mike Rogers! We’re talking about an anti-charismatic old school politician who doesn’t even know what he believes, except for he wants to make himself rich off of the rest of us. You know what I’m gonna do to that man? By the time I’m done, his best friends are gonna look at him and think what I think, say what I say. I’m gonna define him into eternity. Good, help me beat the crap out of you. Little parts of your vestiges — politically — are gonna be scattered all over the state of Michigan, never to be seen again. You say “Mike Rogers,” it’ll be like: “Remember when Abdul just completely demolished that man’s political future?” By the time I’m done with him, people are going to be calling him Five Dollar Rogers.”

Weigel: “Why five dollars?”

El-Sayed: “Because of $5 gas and how he’ll do whatever you want him to do for five bucks.”

Ugh . Per NY Times ICE is upping arrests now but trying to do so without chaos and headlines of the past . But the new sweep has involved the arrest of a Nigerian nun based in South Texas which has gotten attention today.

Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates.

Agency leaders in recent days ordered top ICE officials to focus more of their officers’ efforts on picking up immigrants they want to deport, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with federal officials. ICE officers have arrested people at check-ins, with immigration authorities, during traffic stops and on the street. The push has apparently yielded results, with recent arrest numbers roughly doubling from the 1,000 picked up each day earlier this year.

s. Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, pledged to mount a quieter enforcement campaign following the chaos of a monthlong operation in Minnesota, where federal officers killed two U.S. citizens.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/us/politics/ice-immigrant-arrests-surge.html

Yeah, there was a big operation the next county over from us a few weeks ago where they grabbed more than 100 people in a couple of days. It's completely terrified the local immigrant communities. But they were trying to keep it all pretty low-key, it only became news because local immigrants and advocate groups started spreading the word.

There's an Albania barber down the street from me that was picked up a week or so ago and sent to a detention center in ... Brazil, Indiana? He reportedly came over in 2005 with a fake visa and/or Italian passport, and was allegedly ruled to be deported back in 2008, but skipped. His wife is a US citizen and they have an 8 year old kid. There's a statement from ICE that breaks the record for the number of times it sneeringly invokes "criminal illegal." It's a fucked up situation exacerbated by a complete lack of empathy from assholes that would treat him like shit no matter his status.

That’s the thing, Trump and the Republicans kept saying they would deport everyone, the media kept saying “oh, he only means the criminals”. Tom Homan himself literally said “they’re ALL criminals”.

good morning!

Was glad to see in video clips that there were a number of folks with cowbells, drums, and more outside Malcolm X Park in DC at 8:45 am this morning where Hegseth and Stephen Miller were doing a thank you to a huge number of National Guards standing there. In video clips I have seen you can hear the noise from outside the blocked off park (called Meridian Hill Park by some) while Hegseth is speaking and he then calls the protesters ingrates. The National Guards who stand around DC doing nothing most of the time but looking at their phones cost taxpayers a million dollars a day. Miller referred to them as symbols of the virtues of "Civilization" . I had only heard that Hegseth was gonna be there late last night when I saw on Instagram some flyers about the protest. Malcolm X Park's water fountains that had been actually planned for repair for quite awhile have recently been fixed (via a National Park chosen contractor not a Trump one) and so are working fine and provide a better backdrop. Its disconcerting that Hegseth and Miller and company went to this park that is not down on the mall and is known better and used largely by locals and not tourists and politicians for its Sunday drummers circle, occasional house music events, a Fugazi show, and just hanging out

Florida continues its race to the bottom of humanity

Immigration advocates in Florida have decried a “cruel and harmful” new rule by education officials aligned to hard-right Republican governor Ron DeSantis to ban undocumented students from state colleges and universities.

The Florida board of education voted on Tuesday to bar access to its 28 state-funded institutions to anybody not a US citizen or “lawfully present” in the country. It follows Florida’s move last year to strip discounted in-state tuition rates for certain immigrant students.

Its disconcerting that Hegseth and Miller and company went to this park

It was a show of impunity, that they could come into a neighborhood take over a park named after Malcolm X and do whatever they wanted there. The message: we are the overlords here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/1ulpfy8/stage_falling_apart_at_great_american_state_fair

if it happens on July 4th the world may run out of fireworks

― frogbs, Wednesday, July 1, 2026 6:09 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think about this a lot, especially when I need a pick-me-up: while none of us will ever have the wealth or power of Trump, Elon, et al, it should comfort all of us to know that the response to our demise will not be the deafening sound of champagne corks being popped simultaneously all over the world

they're actually charging that olympic canoeist with a felony count of touching the peeled, floating pool paint

soon to be another L for Jeanine Pirro

They'll get about as far with that as the sandwich-throwing felony count.

well the story is that it's the vandals' fault, not the shitty no-bid contractor or the motorcade that drove across the curing paint

so he'll serve the purpose of supporting the lie until we've forgotten about this whole fiasco

xp why did they design the stage to look like a guillotine

They misread the guillotine order...

Musicology Duck went to the Fourth in DC so we didn’t have to:

https://bsky.app/profile/musicologyduck.bsky.social

NB i live only a couple miles from the fireworks and barely heard anything.

Musicology Duck went to the Fourth in DC so we didn’t have to

did anything interesting happen there which we should read about

sorry, no quite uneventful but everyone gets wet

ideal situation for the duck at least

Is Mitch McConnell dead?

The idea that he's in a coma and on life support in order to avoid calling a special election to fill his seat feels 100% on the nose.

Was Mitch ever truly alive?

Lizards are alive, so I'm thinking it's within reason to say Mitch was, too.

He's 100% dead, and we are being fucked over by the lack of clarity.

everone likes think that it’s an evil prez who ends up a living head in a jar, but not me. it’s instead a moriarty like mcconnell in the glass.

hi mitch— yah, i got you figgered you rat bastard

If he's a corpse on ice the hospital is required to fill in a death certificate and file it. otoh, he could be brain dead and intubated to the hilt, but if there's a heart beat, they can pretend he's alive and on the road to recovery.

David Morris, a journalist and author, also appeared to endorse the theory with a brutal jab at McConnell and his legacy.

“Mitch McConnell remaining technically alive for an extra three weeks because of a manipulative procedural maneuver is exactly how he would have wanted to go out,” Morris wrote in a social media post on X.

lol

Rubio straight up said the other day the objective of the Iran war is to get things back to what they were before they started it

A noble goal!

So the talking point on the Maine ICE murder sent out was, "this is Biden's fault because if he'd been tougher on immigration, ICE wouldn't have been forced to murder the wrong person".

If there were no people, there would be no murders, think about it.

now they're not even saying he 'weaponized his car,' they shot him out of an overabundance of caution for public safety... in front of his three year old daughter no less

Whenever stuff like this or a mass shooting happens, at some point I always think about the dad’s monologue to Ice Cube in Friday about how solving problems with guns is bullshit. All these scared fucks running around with firepower because they’re too cowardly to handle the problem any other way.

not sure how much I believe this, but...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been instructed to suspend most vehicle stops nationwide during immigration enforcement operations, according to federal sources.

Fox News' Bill Melugin said multiple sources have confirmed that agents were told to only do traffic stops for operations targeting the most egregious criminal aliens with serious or violent criminal histories.

^^^^ that's a big caveat, considering that many people they've killed so far were misidentified

Good news:

The Trump administration is abandoning its most aggressive attempt to end gender-affirming care for youth nationally, according to an official document obtained by NPR.

The document shows that the Department of Health and Human Services will not be finalizing a proposed rule that would have blocked all Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care.

Normally, HHS would propose a rule, accept public comment for 60 days, and then finalize the rule so that it could take effect. In this case, after proposing the rule in December and receiving more than 30,000 comments, the administration is abandoning the rule. At least in the next year, it will not be finalized and will not take effect.

Just proposing the rule had a profound chilling effect. No hospital in the USA (except maybe a few private hospitals for the very wealthy) could afford to risk losing their Medicare/Medicaid funding, so the very threat was enough to make many hospitals comply preemptively. Still, good news insofar as it goes.

No idea how real this is, but I'm seeing speculation that the Ossoff/Warnock election fraud announcement could be tied to some engineered confession from Nicolás Maduro regarding Venezuelan interference in the 2020 election.

This has nothing to do with Ossoff being a likely POTUS candidate in ‘28, oh no…

or the fact that Republican senators are dropping dead at an alarming rate

there is no way any of that passes the sniff test

oh no doubt

Trump really doesn't realize how badly 2020 election conspiracy theories are playing now, nobody wants to hear it anymore, even his own party is like "can we move on". some of them will play along because of midterms but it's an act of desperation, not power

the proper response will be a collective [jerk off motion]

nodding along with the phony 2020 chicanery is just a loyalty test at this point

I say just dig in deeper, blame Maduro and his socialist allies the evil Democrats

another toady licks the hand

Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks on Monday introduced a bill that would codify President Trump’s Day 1 executive order reshaping the definition of birthright citizenship in the U.S.

The Citizenship Act of 2026 requires that any person who enters the U.S. “without authorization or for the purpose of engaging in birth tourism is considered an invader.”

“The Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision was an unprecedented assault on American sovereignty, and we must do whatever it takes to save our country,” Banks said in the statement.

Senator Banks, what proof can you offer us that you are a citizen of the USA, aside from the fact you were born in the USA? Oh, I see. You say your parents were citizens. What proof can you offer us that they were citizens?

Repeat as needed.

I like how he sees the status quo ruling as an unprecedented assault

another toady licks the hand

I first misread this as another toady licks the toad. Maybe toad licking would help some of these toads.

appropriately enough, toady is short for toad-eater, indicating the toady would eat a toad in order to please their overlord

I think "all the shit Trump throws to see if any will stick comes from his own diaper" would be a good line of attack, but sometimes I second-guess myself and think the gen. pop. would be turned off by an image that gross, but then again Jamelle Bouie just posted "'merit' means illegal gender discrimination because women in command make pete hegseth’s dick feel soft"

This clip of Ossoff grilling the election denier applicant to be DNI is frightening, not least because I can totally see him getting the position:

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mqp24kjgcv2r

wow, bluesky now requires age verification... no more bluesky for me I guess

Huh, I haven't run into that. Is it a response to a state law?

Yeah, it's only some states. Sometimes when I open it up on my phone it says "We think you're in Texas, so you need to verify your age" and when I let it know my actual location it says, "Oh, Montana? Never mind." (It's kinda surprising Montana hasn't passed a Bluesky age verification law. We have a porn ban here. I bet they will pass one the next time the legislature's actually in session.)

We theoretically have a social media age verification law in Tennessee, but I have yet to notice any sign of it. (Our porn age verification law is in effect, although that appears to be mostly a matter of self-compliance by Big Porn, I haven't seen or heard of any actual state enforcement.)

at first I thought it was like some kind of ad that was hijacking the link to bluesky

the age popup comes and goes for me at random, I think b/c I'm out of the country and confusing it

wait, a porn ban?

Never happened to me. I live in the Free State of Florida.

really? I thought they would be at the vanguard of internet surveillance but I guess the porn industry there has some pull

wait, a porn ban?

It’s not a ban, but a bunch of states have age verification laws for porn sites. The big better-known ones — PornHub and its affiliates, plus yr more legit boutique type sites — have generally responded by just blocking access entirely in those states. But the sketchier non-North America based clip sites have just totally ignored it afaict. And I’ve yet to see or hear of any attempted legal action against them.

(Also I assume dedicated porn consumers are just using VPNs to get around it)

In other news, fuuuuuck this guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uriqNLC6SU

Tbf, I can't think of the last day when *all* news didn't boil down to "fuuuuuck this guy."

some days the news is kind of like "fuck all these people"

Lame duck Republicans like Cornyn could stop Trump’s attorney Blanche from becoming the attorney general, but it’s unlikely because well fuck all these people.

Why would they stop him when he's doing exactly what they want?

My town has no municipal government, which it turns out might have a downside in addition to the upside (no cops).

x-post- I was naively hoping that Cornyn who wanted to stay in Congress but lost in the Texas primary to the Trump endorsed Paxton, would be mad at Trump and stick it to him by voting against Blanche, but yeah even the Republicans that Trump crushes stay obedient to him. Cornyn apparently did ask some tough questions but whether he will follow through on that remains to be seen (and yes is unlikely).

Meanwhile I was reading someone say that Minnesota centrist Dem Klobuchar just asked softball questions to Blanche today. Not surprising but again (just like Justice Kagan's milktoast testimony yesterday) it's aggravating how these centrist Dems don't understand the moment and adjust.

this guy again

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/trump-endorses-mypillow-mike-lindell-for-minnesota-governor

Klobuchar should beat the corrupt pillow guy in the governor's race but will she show the energy and offer the policy ideas that Minnesota Dems want

klobuchar vs my pillow guy

excellent, the state of the union is strong

minnesota voters, get out to vote for klobuchar against my pillow guy! with each passing day you’re closer to death!

will she show the energy and offer the policy ideas that Minnesota Dems want

she will give the bare minimum that they demand

sorry i’m being all weird, heh! seems bad though. being a moderate dem in this era is despicable and really hard to support in anything but really practical AND cynical terms, like those two bonded together

like, good for klobuchar, i’m sure she votes with democrats 90% of the time or whatever, but also what a total failure to have someone like that in a leadership position, a total weakass politician built on nothing and reliable for absolutely nothing

she fucking sucks and is also a complete weirdo and a shitty human to boot