Today's Tweet

Show up or shut up.

America is calling YOU. To Register, To Vote. Turnout! Hanx🇺🇸 https://t.co/I6BptOBGsj pic.twitter.com/zgWu2O4AH9

— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) August 22, 2018

And I'm not interested in hearing your whiny-butt bullshit about how you hate all of them and so you're going to pick up your jacks or your marbles or whatever and go play where nobody's being mean to each other.

You're a fucking grownup now. You can't hide from the fact that you're supposed to have come to some understanding of how things are interconnected - the ripple effect - how everything you do has some effect on everything everybody else does.

You choose not to do something, and you've created a vacuum, and somebody else is only too glad to step in and exercise your power for you - almost always not to your benefit.

When you have the opportunity to vote against the greater of two evils, what the fuck are doing sitting on your ass?

Today's Pix

Today's Fitness Goal

Stay alive long enough to see any member of the Trump family having to face the consequences of their actions.

Randy Sings Omarosa

Randy Rainbow:

"Excuse me ... I'll do the blowing around here."

BTW - what's with the shoe?

Today's GIF

Don't skip leg day.

The Message

Families torn apart.
A man arrested and deported as he drives his pregnant wife to the the hospital.
Kids in cages.
Girls sexually assaulted by ICE agents.
And...

Susan Ferriss, WaPo:

Tameika Lovell was retrieving luggage at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport when Customs and Border Protection officers detained her for a random search. It was Nov. 27, 2016, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the school counselor from Long Island had just returned from a short Jamaica vacation. Lovell, who is black, had been stopped before, but this time a CBP supervisor began asking questions she hadn’t heard previously.

“Don’t you think you’re spending too much money traveling?” Lovell, 34, recalls a CBP supervisor asking.

What happened next is the subject of a harrowing lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Inside a secure room, Lovell’s litigation alleges, a female CBP officer searched Lovell’s belongings, presumably for illegal drugs, and asked if she was using a tampon or sanitary pad. The question upset her, but Lovell replied “no” and complied when told to remove her shoes, lift her arms and spread her legs.

As a second female officer observed, hand on her firearm, the lawsuit says, the first officer touched Lovell “from head to toe” before ordering her to squat. Lovell was clothed, but the lawsuit claims that the officer squeezed Lovell’s breasts, and, “placed her right hand into [Lovell’s] pants ‘forcibly’ inserting four gloved fingers into plaintiff’s vagina” before parting Lovell’s buttocks “for viewing.”
The Banality of Evil tells us that eventually, abuse of power happens just because people have the power (and understand that having that power lessens the likelihood of being held to account), so the abuse becomes an end in itself.  Torture for the sake of torture. Power is abused simply because people have the power to abuse.

There are reasons for all of this. There's nothing particularly random about it, even if it's more stochastic than scripted.
So at this point, I have to conclude that while plenty of the shitty things happening to immigrants at the hands of ICE and CBP are happening just because people are people and people can get real shitty real fast when unrestrained, I have to remember that the policy behind these shitty occurrences is intended to engender these shitty things in order to send a message that "we'll fuck you up if you come here - don't come here'.

The Daddy State is on the porch, and it's bangin' on the door.

A Poem

Another one from Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

What seems like an admonition - "Just cheer up and everything is peachy" - turns out to be a kind of an ironic lament.

Really glad to have been turned on to Ms Wilcox. I stumbled across her work when I went in search of a quote misattributed to Abe Lincoln.

Today's Tweet

Some days it's really hard to see how we're going to get thru this Cult45 nightmare. 

Then this comes along and the road back looks a little shorter.

This white guy just pulled up in front of my local Mexican restaurant in his big truck, blaring music and saw a group of young Latino men drinking on the sidewalk. He rolled down the window, everyone paused warily. Then he shouts: “I love you, brothers! Fuck Trump! Let’s dance.” pic.twitter.com/ze1SlP74lZ

— Shannon 🙅🏻‍♀️ (@TheStagmania) August 17, 2018

Today's Pix

Yeesh

Dear Senator Burr,

Maybe Mr Brennan has a living thinking brain in his head and he's capable of using it to ascertain a few things on his own, given what the whole world has seen in the public record.

Or, to put it in a way that even you and the deliberately ignorant rubes can grok: