Broken News: Let's ask dumb voters dumber questions!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with Youth Correspondent Maynard G. Krebs

We've all been there: you're embarking on a long trip and you find yourself stuck in an agonizing traffic jam.  Eventually, you see the blue lights ahead and you realize there's been an accident.

As you get closer, you tell yourself you're not going to look.  It's gross and pointless.  Just keep your eyes on the road and your ears on your podcast.  Then as you crawl by, you can't control yourself.  You look.  Just a glance at the twisted metal, the ambulances, the police.  Finally, you break free, vaguely disgusted by your weakness.

It's like a Times focus group:
you hate yourself for gawking at it.

That's how we feel about New York Times Opinion focus groups, that flaming wreck of a concept supposedly intended to bring us snotty out-of-touch elites in touch with the hopes, dreams, fears, and thoughts of average Americans, at least as assembled by long-time Republican hack Frank Luntz and his minions. 

The setup is the same: assemble a small group of people with supposedly similar voting patterns and demographics, ask them a series of dumb open-ended questions, and then print their answers without asking how they came to hold their ridiculous views.  The invariable takeaway is despair at the Mitch McConnell-like state of your fellow citizens.

This week we are treated to the views of ten yutes who voted for the Mad King for reasons not readily accessible to them. 

The groupmeister, or whatever you call them, launched into a series of stupid questions that lead to nothing, e.g. how  do you think AI will affect your future?  How the f*** would they know, except for the one poor soul who already got laid off due to AI.  No useful information was generated.

Eventually they got to the money shot:  What did these Mad King voters think about their boy now?

They're pretty content with their horrible decision.  Why?  Let's ask Christian, a Latino Republican:

So a Latino man (just like the ones murdered by ICE goons this week) likes the mass deportation of  “dangerous people,” whatever that means.

Parenthetically, guys like Christian demonstrate why the Republican paranoia about immigration is unfounded.  The fear used to be that all these illegals would magically become citizens (at best, about a ten year process), and then vote Democratic.

Yeah, not so much.  Anyone who deals with immigrants knows full well that once their status is assured, they are perfectly happy to feed their former countrymen to the Republican sharks.  As one of our colleagues, the daughter of Central American immigrants, put it about her relatives: “As soon as they make more than $50,000 a year, they vote Republican.”

It's the American way.

Now inquiring minds might want to ask Christian what's good about deporting hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children back to danger and misery, when only some of them are “dangerous.” But that would be an act of journalism, and thus antithetical to every principle of focus grouping (apparently).

And anyway, we have to get to Jake:

Which foreign policy stuff has been good, Jake?  Launching an illegal war of choice against Iran, which we have lost decisively and humiliatingly?  Abandoning Ukraine to Russian aggression? Destroying the NATO alliance?  Threatening our allies like Canada and Denmark with conquest?  Imposing illegal sales taxes on foreign imports?

That seems like an easy enough follow up question, but again, there's nothing to see here people, get back in your lane and make way for the tow truck.

It's time for the focus group to turn to a really pointless and unilluminating game: word association!

For twenty points and a chance at the Broyhill dinette set, what five words do you associate with Democrats?

Pride?  That's why they won't vote Democratic?  And what does that mean anyway?  The idea that people should have the same basic rights regardless of sexual preference or identity is so horrifying to them that they would vote for an adjudicated sexual predator?  Yes, the Democrats have their work cut out for them.

And Socialism?  That's big nay too, possibly because for the past 100 years Republicans have smeared every Democrats from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Zohran Mamdani as the second coming of Joe Stalin.  And it's worked, at least judging by these deep thinkers.

How could Democrats remove this dark stain?  Maybe they could do so by supporting a social and political order that has directed almost all benefits of the last 40 years of economic growth to a tiny insatiable plutocratic elite. 

The captious among you may respond that that's exactly what Democrats have done for a generation or more, and it has availed them not, judging by these bright young exemplars of America's future. 

So what have we learned from this focus group?

That's easy: nothing.

But the point is not to explore why voters think they way they do.  That would be journalism.

The point is to provide fodder to Harvard-Dalton gasbags and other clowns who like to lecture Democrats on how they must reach out to young voters like these by abandoning anything that Republicans could smear as “Socialism” or “overly inclusive.” 

The problem with that argument, aside from its moral and intellectual vacuity, is that it never works.  No matter how weak Democrats are on correcting the manifest injustices and evil of our society, Republicans and their media enablers will smear them.  So moving to a non-existent center ensures electoral futility by alienating the large progressive base that animates the Democratic Party while failing to appeal to well-informed independent thinkers like those found in Times focus groups. 

If so, then the Democrats should stop cowering every time some bigot whines about something they heard from a steroid-crazed moron like Pride of Newton South Joe Rogan or creepy Jesse Watters and actually stand and fight.

Maybe these focus group dopes have something to teach us after all.  We, unlike them, stand corrected. 

Good and Brain-dead: Republican institutionalist and Mad King creator

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor

We’ve had our obit of Senator Mitch McConnell ready to go for a long time. It seems appropriate to publish it now, as the actions of his famously loyal, devoted, and loving wife Elaine Chao, who remained in China to meet with her bosses while her husband lay in intensive care in Washington city, made it clear that Mitch, like Elvis, has left the stadium.

As a man who never did a kind or worthy thing during his entire life on Earth, you might think he’s not worthy of a lengthy threnody, but he is. Not because of any virtue he possessed or because he left behind friends and family who will mourn his passing (9,000 miles away in their Beijing hotel suite), but because he was the living embodiment of a basic truth about the last 60 years of Republican parties.

Despite the endless efforts by Republican hacks and shills to paint the Mad King as an unprecedented and inexplicable departure from decades of worthy Republicans like Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Deadeye Dick Cheney, the opposite is true. And the sorry life of Mitch McConnell literally provides the actual and spiritual link between the Republican Party of Tricky Dick Nixon and the Fascist clown show now being performed by the Mad King.

Mitch McConnell, about to get on a 20-minute phone call

There would be no Mad King regime without Mitch McConnell. In February 2021, after the deranged sex offender had come within 20 feet of storming the Capitol and overthrowing the verdict of the American electorate, it was ol’ Mitch who threw out the life preserver.

When Democrats and even a few theretofore spineless Republicans demanded that the Constitutional order threatened by the Tangerine-Faced Fascist be restored through the remedy that the Constitution specifically provides for such abuse of power, it was Mitch who persuaded the Senate not to find Jeffrey Epstein’s BFF guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors or to bar him from future office. Mitch, his wattles quavering with pretend integrity, said that the Mad King, out of office after January 20, could no longer be tried. This happens to be, what’s the word for it, a lie, but it was enough to give Republicans cover to let former President U Bum fight another day.

Nor was that the only occasion on which Mitch provided crucial assistance to the Republican campaign against our former democracy. Many of the Mad King’s most ludicrously illegal abuses of power have been rubber-stamped by a bent Republican Supreme Court. These unelected Republican Lords have for example invented absolute Presidential immunity for criminal acts related to his office. This has provided all the cover the Mad King has needed to corrupt and debase formerly honorable institutions like the Department of Justice, while lining his own pockets with billions in ill-gotten crypto and other gains.

That same bent Court also decided that the Mad King could impose his insane crooked whims on all formerly independent agencies (overruling over a century of accepted statutory law blessed by that same Court ninety years earlier), except the one that protects the bank accounts of those crooked Justices and their plutocratic overlords. Hey, do you think you can buy or wipe your greasy mitts on Schickelgruber’s table linen for free?

That Supreme Court would not exist without the unceasing efforts of Mitch McConnell. We won’t dwell on his decades of shepherding horrible Republican nominees like John Roberts ‘76, Long Dong Thomas, and Surly Sam Alito onto the Court, because he was only acting in lockstep with his racist reactionary Republican colleagues. And those three are but half of the unelected Council of Doges that has destroyed the Court as a judicial body.

Let’s turn back to 2016 when Nino Scalia, a previous horrible law-free Republican reactionary who provided the deciding vote that elected George W. Bush President, lost a wrestling match with his pillow. 

Too soon? 

Scalia rigged the 2000 election and rewrote the Second Amendment during his years in office, leading to the plague of gun violence that has mowed down thousands of innocent lives. Mourn them first.

As was customary, the then President, a smart lawyer named Barack Obama, did what any President would do: he nominated a replacement he thought would be palatable to the majority Republicans of the Senate, an accomplished seasoned moderate milquetoast and former prosecutor named Merrick Garland.

But Mitch’s brain, still supplied with oxygen in those bygone days, came up with the argument that because Obama was in the last year of his second term, anything he did could be ignored. Garland wouldn’t even get the courtesy of hearing (because such a hearing would demonstrate both his unthreatening nature and his obvious competence). All Republicans joined him in this blockade.

Kentuckians throng to mourn Mitch's passing

When Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College vote to the Mad King, Mitch was beside himself with joy. After celebrating with undoubtedly many rounds of exciting and fulfilling coitus with his adoring and adorable wife Elaine, he voted to confirm for the seat Garland was blocked from a mediocre reactionary Re;publican named Neil Gorsuch. That was bent Republican #4.

The following year, Mitch had no problem installing a lying drunken sex offender onto the court, Brett “It won’t come off” Kavanaugh. Bent Republican #5.

And then the postman rang a second time.  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in declining health for years, died in September 2020, two months before Election Day 2020 and while America was reeling from the COVID pandemic that the Mad King did his best to propagate.

Mitch had previously assured Republicans that if Ginsburg died before Election Day, he would make damn sure that Republicans filled the seat, notwithstanding his prior principled opposition to voting on Supreme Court nominees in the last year of a Presidential term.

Sure enough, he rammed through the confirmation of a spooky mediocre Handmaid, Amy Coney Barret, while the earth was still piled on Ginsburg's grave.  And he gloated about it too. 

So the next time you have a 20-minute phone call with Mitch, be sure to congratulate him on his role in constructing an entirely illegitimate and lawless Supreme Court devoted to enshrining extreme Republican ideology into law. 

But we, unlike our subject today, have a functioning cerebrum, so we can remember all of Mitch's legislative accomplishments during his career as a living Republican Senator. For his entire career, he fought consistently to enrich the rich and powerful and torment the poor and powerless. 

Especially loathsome was his habit of gloating over doing terrible things.  After 20 kids and 6 teachers were slaughtered at Sandy Hook by some loser who borrowed his mother's high-powered assault rifle, President Obama tried to do something to prevent such slaughters from happening again.

Mitch stopped him cold and posted this:

Like the entitled white Southern racist he was, he also boasted that his goal was to do everything in his power to frustrate President Obama and ensure his defeat.  And he was a man of his word, when he was able to express words. Tax cuts for the rich. Benefit cuts for the poor. All mainstream Republican positions.

As noted above, he supported the Mad King's assault on democracy and the rule of law.  Even when he disagreed with the Mad King, like Ukraine, he did jack s***, his spine having predeceased his brain.

His odious life makes clear that the Mad King is not some anomaly arising from radioactive waste infecting cheap bronzer, like Godzilla.  The Mad King and Mitch McConnell swim in the same fetid Republican stream of white supremacy, plutocracy, and just plain evil.

If you think we are generalizing from perhaps an isolated example, as we were going to press we learned of the death of Lindsay Graham, another spineless white Southern mediocrity who went from impeachment hellhound in 1998 to Republican hack to enthusiastic supporter and taint polisher of the Mad King and all that he has done to our nation. 

Thanks to men like this, children are waking up hungry in America, millions who lost their health insurance dread any illness, and hundreds of thousands around the world from Uvalde to Sudan to Iran aren't waking up at all, having been killed by the policies of the Mad King and his miserable henchmen.

We do have one bit of advice: try to live your life so that when you are on your deathbed, your spouse doesn't decide to leave you to your fate and remain in China to take care of family business.  

Or, for future reference, Slovenia. 

America at 250: our saddest Independence Day

America at 250

By Isaiah Thomas
Board of Editors

Those of us around in 1976 remember the Bicentennial as a jolly, somewhat goofy affair that like most things that happened in the Seventies can be enjoyed as a somewhat embarrassing memory.

We were listening to The Captain and Tennille.  We had disco fever.  We played that funky music, white boy.  We'd go on, but we can't keep breaking your heart.

Americans were in a partying mood.  We had narrowly staved off the collapse of American democracy in 1974, thanks to incontrovertible taped evidence of Tricky Dick Nixon's corruption and criminality.  The President was the relatively harmless and good-natured Gerald Ford, who seemed destined to be defeated by an affable Southern peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.

So we had a good hot fun American summer with fireworks, barbecue, and cocaine.  It was the Seventies, ffs.

No one in those innocent days could imagine that a 30-year-old repulsive nepo baby lounge lizard who creeped on Eastern European “supermodels”, i.e. whores, would avoid jail and rise to become President, not once but twice.

Which brings us to our current plight.

At the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are in thrall to a tyranny far more oppressive and corrupt than the one that led the colonists to break away from the supposedly tyrannical King George III.

All three branches of our Government are in the death grip of a Republican plutocracy that makes the pre-Civil War Slave Power seem almost benign by comparison (unless you're an enslaved person of color, that is).  The rule of law has crumbled, as the regime indicts its critics for comments made in seashells.  The Republican-dominated Supreme Court just this week made it clear that it was one vote away from repealing the Fourteenth Amendment, a re-establishment of our nation baptized in the blood of 360,000 loyal American soldiers.

Fight like this guy...

Our 18th Century Framers, in their wisdom, sought to protect their new nation from tyranny by distributing power into three branches.  After 50 years of unceasing agitation by the rich and racist, their scheme crumbled into dust.

The Congress, narrowly dominated by extremist Republican nonentities who owe their political survival to their President, has failed to protect the Constitution they swore to uphold.  It has authorized or acquiesced in every assault on our nation and our liberties, from putting the Justice Department at the disposal of a criminal Executive to wiping out centuries of progress in public health to letting a ketamine-demented plutocrat bring death and agony to hundreds of thousands of helpless people by undoing Congressionally-appropriated foreign aid.

Meanwhile the Republican-bent Supreme Court (but not to their credit the trial-level Federal judiciary) has transformed, contrary to the Constitution's text and structure, the law-bound Executive into an all-powerful king free of any checks on his power, no matter how crazy. 

Contrary to the Constitution, the Court gave the President immunity from criminal liability for acts committed as President.  As a result, the current tyrant commits crimes with impunity, because he knows he can.  Just this week, those same bent Justices, supposedly in the name of democracy, gave the President unlimited power to fire members of almost all independent agencies, despite the decision of the democratic branches, repeated time and again over 100 years, that such quasi-judicial agencies deserved a measure of autonomy.

Fortunately, as with the revolt against the supremacy of the Slave Power in 1860, there has been resistance.  We are fighting back.  

But we suggest taking a lesson from the greatest warrior in American History, General U.S. Grant.  When the Slave Power tried to break the United States by force of arms, many Northern worthies thought that the rebellion would be quickly extinguished by a modest degree of military action and what we would call today “bipartisan cooperation.”

It didn't work out that way.  The Confederates were serious about destroying their country to protect slavery.  They would die and kill lavishly for their cause.

Grant knew that the response would have to be overwhelming and ceaseless:

Unlike McClellan, Grant would pursue a policy of “desperate and continuous hard fighting,” inflicting massive casualties and applying unrelenting pressure.

R. Chernow, Grant at 356.  

After the Confederacy had surrendered, and the white racists respawned (which is where we are today), Grant had a similar reaction to a coup against the Reconstruction government of Louisiana:

To Grant, it looked as if the country might be lurching toward a second Civil War....Grant's crisp, decisive actions stopped an insurrectionary movement in its tracks.

Id. at 762. 

Which brings us to where we are today.  Like Grant, if we have any hope of vanquishing the despoilers of our democracy, we have to understand the enemy.  

Mayor Mamdani's remarks are a good place to start:

Mamdani: "As we mark 250 years ... we see the wealthiest country -- one where children go to sleep hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more ... we see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans"

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 3, 2026 at 10:26 AM

 

In some ways, our tyrannical adversary is more powerful than the Confederacy.  In other ways, it resembles the pre-secession grasp of the Slave Power that dominated all three branches of the Government.

As mentioned above, all three branches have largely marched together in replacing our democracy with a new white racist kleptocracy.  In this enterprise they have been aided by powerful private forces.

The first is the plutocratic control of the means of communication.  Since Inauguration Day 2025, formerly powerful and independent media voices like The Washington Post and CBS have become mouthpieces for tyranny. CNN, soon to be owned by the same reactionary skillionaires who swallowed and ruined CBS News, is likely to follow suit. 

Formerly open social media networks, like Twitter, Tik-Tok (owned by the same guys who destroyed CBS), and Facebook are now censored and dissenting views algorithmically suppressed because their owners seek to curry favor with the regime or, like Twitter, are under the control of a neo-Nazi ketamine-demented trillionaire who illegally destroyed USAID.

...not this one

Those same heartless plutocrats continue to spend billions to nobble the democratic process, overwhelming the marketplace of ideas with dark and dirty money.  In this enterprise, they have been aided by the Republican Supreme Court, which for decades has equated money with speech, as if there is a First Amendment right to scream into a megaphone so immense it drowns out all other speakers.

Finally, there is a powerful network of white bigots, sometimes pretending to espouse Christian values found nowhere in Christian Scripture (or anyone else's).  Their hate endangers not only people of color, but also women, immigrants, LGBTQ persons, and anyone who stands in the way of their effort to pervert America into an intolerant anti-intellectual wasteland. 

Only by knowing our enemies can we defeat them.  They rule not principally by force of arms (although Renee Good and Alex Pretti may beg to disagree) but by their interlocking control of all levers of power, government and private.  Therefore, violence is not justified  Nor is it likely to succeed.  Rather the opposite.

Instead total war must be waged on all fronts.  The 2026 elections are a place to start, because taking back Congress would in effect cut off one of the tyranny's most powerful tentacles.

The 2028 election becomes even more consequential. We must elect not just a Democrat, but one who is committed to a full agneda of restoring democracy.  That means junking the filibuster, radically reforming the Supreme Court with new judges (or opening membership to lower court judges selected by lot for a particular case), term limits, and limits on their jurisdiction.

It means conditioning appropriations on purging the Executive Branch of corrupt depraved scoundrels.  It means reforming the Department of Justice so that it is free to pursue criminal matters at the discretion of merit appointees, not unqualified political hacks and nitwits. 

It means pushing back on media capture, starting with x'ing out X.  

It means rebuilding the regulatory state so that fraudsters and plutocrats (and their failsons) can no longer manipulate markets with impunity.  Sorry, Eric.

It means withdrawing tolerance from racists and whackjobs and demanding that universities stand up for traditional academic values, like free inquiry.

It means focusing on state governments, which have proven to be to tyranny what cruise ships are to norovirus: incubators of fatal disease.  No one wants to think about state government, but the capture of states by white racists and plutocrats has proven to be a potent threat to democracy everywhere.  If you don't believe me, you're not a poor 19-year-old teenager in McAllen, Texas in desperate need of medication abortion.

It mean ceasing to take seriously clown pundits pushing a falsified narrative that both sides are at fault because someone once yelled at some dips*** judge at Stanford.  Same for Harvard-Dalton douchebags counseling moderation because they are supposedly in such close touch with the hopes and dreams of America's heartland voters.

Will this work?  We don't know.  Grant may not have been sure that the Union Army would win, but that didn't stop him from exerting every effort toward victory.

The current tyrant is historically unpopular and polling suggests this may be a good year for Democrats.  But it's a damned close-run thing.  Here's the current status of Senate races:

The fight for American democracy rests on a knife's edge.

It reminds us that the final pillar of support for the second (or third) coming of the Slave Power is the thus far unshakable support of tens of millions of white racists who enjoy watching the daily performance of white dominance and cruelty emanating from the White House.

They are the folks who interpret “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as nothing more than white supremacy and cheap gas. 

Are there more of us or more of them?  

We won't know unless we fight, like Grant's Army, on this line all summer.  

As Andrei Navalny, who sacrificed his life to free his country from an even more powerful and loathsome tyranny, reminded all of us: “You're not allowed to give up.” 

Good and dead: inept apologist for financial finagling and former Ayn Rand boy toy Alan Greenspan

  

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor

The best way to get eyeballs in front of an obituary of an old economist who was wrong about everything in the service of plutocracy is to ask whether in fact he shtupped Ayn Rand.

So let's start our obsequies for Alan Greenspan, dead at 100, with that burning question (the burning probably caused by the VD he caught from the old slag).

The New York Times was coy:

As he was building a professional reputation during the 1950s, Mr. Greenspan was also developing an intense free-market philosophy, one that was heavily influenced by Ms. Rand, whose novels espoused laissez-faire capitalism built around a “rational selfishness,” or the idea that society functions best when individuals pursue their self-interest....

Ayn and Alan cosplay remains popular

Through his first wife, Mr. Greenspan met Ms. Rand in 1952 and soon became part of her inner circle, spending hours debating the relationships among individuals, governments and markets. 

Eventually, Mr. Greenspan said, Ms. Rand taught him that capitalism was not only efficient and practical, but moral.

“What she did for me, which was an extraordinary experience, was to demonstrate — that is, aggressively backing me into a corner — that the positions I was holding were wrong, fundamentally contradictory,” Mr. Greenspan said .... “I was really fascinated and, over the years, as I got to know her better and read her materials and had conversations with her, she had a sort of effect similar to that of a favorite college professor.”

Maybe he like being aggressively backed into a corner, if you catch our drift. Others were less oblique: 

The other thing to note about Rand is that she ran what was effectively a sex cult. Now, I don’t particularly care who has sex with who. It’s unclear whether Greenspan and Rand ever had sex. 

So the young dork was a member of a sex cult run by an amoral predatory old hag, but they achieved orgasm only through arguing libertarian theory. Hoo-kay.

Certainly the fact that Greenspan met Ayn through his then-wife and then forthwith divorced said wife is absolutely irrelevant. 

But we don't want to focus on the image of a leather-clad Ayn Rand whipping Alan Greenspan while he was on his hands and knees to take away from the real point here, which was Alan's lifelong and loving embrace of her s****y ideas:

Soon one of the leading Objectivists, Greenspan contributed essays to Rand’s books, including one supporting the gold standard, which should have permanently barred him from Washington circles, but of course did not. Greenspan became one of the leading prophets of Rand’s ideology, including offering a public ten-lecture course called “The Economics of a Free Society,” in the mid 1960s. All of this talked about the horrors of government intervention in the economy, how social programs destroyed freedom, and how any kind of collective economic response to crises simply made it worse. That one could have lived through the Great Depression and how the New Deal responded to it and think this is completely mindblowing to me. But then I guess I just don’t get the great thinker Rand.  

In fairness to the delighter of superannuated Russian exiles, the conflation of economics and moral philosophy was a common intellectual error during Greenspan's life.

Greenspan was part of a generation of self-important gasbags with Ph.D.'s in Economics (Milton Friedman was another leading example) who claimed that they had discovered, like Casaubon, the Key to All Mythologies.

Economics is the quantitative study of markets and wealth.  It's a real discipline, today mostly centered on complex models that try to shed light on what happens to x if y?  It's worth knowing what happens to, say, the health of starving African refugees if a ketamine-demented Nazi is allowed to destroy U.S. Government aid programs. (Hint: the modeling shows they die by the millions).

But Greenspan and his generation claimed that their genius economic analysis proved Gordon Gekko's adage: Greed is Good.

Now aside from the proven falsity of the claim (we'll get back to that), there was a deeper problem.  An empirical discipline can't make a moral judgment.  It can provide a factual basis for a moral judgment, like it's evil to allow a ketamine-demented Nazi to bring suffering and death to millions, but it doesn't lead to a particular moral judgment.

Ayn Rand knew this, and concluded that all that morality stuff was just so much spilled lube. 

But sentient people who have any acquaintance with the ethical foundations of any civilization on Earth know better. To Cain's question, “Am I my brother's keeper?” Ayn Rand would reply, “F*** no!” and if Cain was as hot as Alan, she'd repeat the first word followed by “me!”

That's not the answer most of us would embrace unless we are Republicans.

But the supposed wisdom of the Great Conservative Economists were fatally flawed in ways that now seem obvious to even the meanest intelligence.

We recall Greenspan's acolytes using their vast knowledge of Economics to assert that there was no such thing as a free lunch.  The assertion was usually made by privileged white men whose entire lives had been a free lunch.

Even their economic theories were suspect to empirical falsification.  Those of us who took Ec 10 in the previous century remember learning about Friedman's monetary theory, which alleged that the only thing that mattered to the economy was the money supply.  And what was money, anyway?   Was it cash, cash plus demand deposits, cash plus overnight repos, cash plus money market funds?  Was it M1, M2, M2+, M3, and all the way to M11, which runs up Amsterdam Avenue by the way?

Of course money can be created by credit, as you did when you tapped your Visa card at Starbucks this morning.  Its effect on the economy can also vary depending on how fast it circulates through the economy, known as velocity.

Which is why no one today gives a toss about the money supply or anything else Milton Friedman ever said.

In fact, the discipline of Economics provides no justification for Ayn Rand's predatory immoral libertarian views, although those views can lead to a good time once wifey goes home.

So Greenspan was full of s*** as a moral philosopher.

But that's not the end of his story.  His predilection for free markets led him to f*** up the most important economic even of his lifetime: the near collapse of the world economy in 2008 due to failure to regulate Wall Street's lust for risk, which turned out to have far worse effects than lust for crazy old Eurotrash like Rand.

His enthusiastic embrace of deregulation and the unfailing wisdom of markets, dominated by greedy short-term finaglers on Wall Street, almost killed us all:

Mr. Greenspan argued that the financial markets, and investment firms themselves, would do a better job of policing excess risk than the government could ever do.

Nonetheless, the financial collapse of 2008 did little to alter his view that markets are better than governments at regulating risk, despite the damage done to entire economies when markets failed.  

Greenspan may have been unable to learn from experience (possibly as a result of the tertiary syphilis he caught from Rand) but others drew the lesson:

 

 

That's former Secretary of Labor and Berkeley Professor Robert Reich, by the way.

The government's failure to regulate risk taking required that same government to bail out financial institutions in 2008, and going forward to in effect provide a government guarantee of debt issued by Wall Street colossi deemed “too big to fail.” If the government hadn't stepped in, civilization as we knew would have collapsed.  If that seems apocalyptic to you, remember that during the financial crisis, perfectly solvent and profitable corporations worried that they would be unable to meet their payrolls due to the money market meltdown.

What Greenspan failed to understand is that the market is the result of actions by individuals.  It is rational for traders to load up on as much risk as possible to juice their income.  It's also rational for them to maximize their short-term gain on the theory that they'll be gone when the house of cards collapses.  As happened in 2008.

It turned out that Randian excesses were more fun and less consequential in Riverside Drive bedrooms than on Wall Street trading floors.  Unbridled greed, avarice, and (Ayn's favorite) lust were not only immoral; they were capable of nuking civilization as we have come to know it.   

We know this now, although a new generation of finaglers is busy trying to undermine the regulations put in place to curb their excesses.  

The 2008 economic cataclysm and bailout permanently wiped out Alan Greenspan's reputation as a serious thinker.  He'll have to be remembered by posterity instead as an overachieving boy toy. 

Concentration camps? Not in my back yard!

 

 

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman with Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk in The Everglades

A funny thing happened on the way to the construction of a network of American concentration camps in which immigrants seeking status would be locked up and tortured on the orders of the Mad King and his trusted lackey,Sturmbannfūhrer Stephen Miller.

However much Americans enjoyed the spectacle of immigrants, especially black and brown ones, tormented, it turns out that they didn't want the camps in their own back yards.  All that nasty traffic, you see.

For those of you who weren't paying attention, which was about 77 million of you at last count, the Mad King kept his promise to afflict helpless immigrants, unlike all the other promises he broke or forgot.

One of the key planks in Miller's platform of sadism was to lock up hundreds of thousands of immigrants to pressure them into abandoning their claims for asylum or other status in the United States and accept deportation to their home countries, if they were lucky, or hellholes like the Congo, if they were not.

As we explained in these pages last month: 

In a free society, locking people up except as punishment for crimes has been traditionally frowned upon.  In the case of immigrants without or seeking status, detention is authorized only in narrow categories: (1) the detainee is a danger to public safety (like criminal bail), (2) the detainee is a flight risk, (3) the detainee is about to be deported following a removal order or (4) the detainee entered without inspection and was arrested shortly thereafter.

Note what's not on the list: locking people up either for the simple joy of watching them suffer (like Kristi Noem at CECOT), or to compel them to give up their legal rights.

But the rule of law matters not a whit to the Republican lords who control all three branches of what was once a legitimate government. 

Which is why Kristi and her very “special assistant” Corey Lewandowski, with the connivance of Miller and the possible acquiescence of the Mad King, embarked on a billion-dollar spending spree:

The idea was meant to supercharge President Trump’s mass deportation plan.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement would purchase more than a dozen empty warehouses across the United States to massively expand its capacity to detain people deemed to be in the country illegally, which in turn would spike deportations. A year into Mr. Trump’s term, it had bought 11 facilities at a cost of $1 billion. 

Note that removal proceedings against immigrants continue whether or not they are detained. The “supercharging” effect of concentration camps was simply to make life so wretched for these people that they would give up and leave.

ICE gleefully provided a schematic of what these camps would look like like once stuffed with humanity:

 

Each tiny line is a person, locked up in one of 72 cages, none of which are exposed to natural light or fresh air.  We think we know where ICE got the idea for this layout:

Like immigration detainees, the passengers on those ships hadn't committed any crime.

A funny thing happened on the way to building out Kristi's Gulag: the locals weren't having it:

With plans for detaining up to 10,000 people, the detention center would have tripled the local population, putting strains on drinking water and sewage, as well as on local police and ambulances.

Despite being located in a county where nearly 75% of people voted for Trump, residents of the rural town with 19th-century buildings downtown and surrounding horse and cattle farms began mobilizing against the plan.

The Guardian was the first to report that Taylor shut off the federal government’s access to water at the warehouse in February as the controversy took off. 

Note what the good white crackers of exurban Georgia weren't worried about.  They weren't worried that some future General Eisenhower would parade them through the camp to confront them with the atrocities carried out in their name.

They were worried about trivia like how you supply water and sewerage adequate for a warehouse of perhaps 100 employees to an entire city of misery, comprising 10,000 souls who must drink to survive, not to mention what happens at the other end.

And they weren't happy about traffic and other sequelae not fitting to their rural paradise.

The scenario was played out at all these sites.  Apparently, neither Kristi nor Corey spent much time in their flying love shack thinking about how to supply these camps.

Now the Mad King's regime has surrendered to its base and admitted that they flushed $700,000,000 down $5,000 worth of toilets:

But in a major turnabout, the agency is planning to offload seven warehouses purchased for more than $700 million by either giving them to other federal agencies or selling them outright, 

The MAGA faithful were none too happy
about a gulag in their backyard.

Similarly, down in the swamps of Florida, Gov. Ron DeathSantis's proof of atrocity concept camp he named, with his customary charm and wit, “Alligator Alcatraz” has been ordered abandoned, thus wasting the $300 million (or more) of state resources he poured into a state facility designed to enforce federal law for no purpose other than preening photo ops.

The reason for the closure of the vile tent prison?  Gov. Ron was shocked, shocked to learn that the camp was located in a hurricane zone and could not be evacuated in case of an approaching storm.

Wow, who saw that coming?   Other than the alligators.

But the cruel fascist campaign to lock up immigrants who pose no threat to anyone to persuade them to give up their legal rights will continue despite the billion dollars wasted thus far.

The Supreme Court is now in session at bay 29 (PBS)

And thus far the response from both white America and our beloved mainstream media to these concentration camps has been at best a carping meow, rather than the rolling thunder of outrage reserved for Biden's age or his decision to end an unwinnable 20-year war in Afghanistan.

The stain on this country, like those of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans,, will remain forever, unlike the paint in the Reflecting Pool which lasted about a week.

There is one bright spot though, as we have previously noted in these pages.  The warehouse purchased in the wilds of Maryland, while woefully inadequate for the immiseration of thousands, would be a perfect site to relocate the bent Supreme Court when their marble palace on Capitol Hill is repurposed as something more useful.  We'd suggest the Thurgood Marshall Center for the Study of Civil Rights, complete with a daycare center in the old courtroom and community access to Brett Kavanaugh's basketball court.

Now that would be a fitting way to celebrate America at 250.  We'll just have to wait another two years. 

The Front Page of the Spy's Print Edition 6/16/2026: D-I Day!

 

The War at Home: The Second Battle of Newark

 

 

By New Jersey Correspondent Ernestine G. Carey with Immigration Editor Emma Goldman

NEWARK – The same masked federally-deputized desperadoes who brought death and destruction to Minneapolis last winter have been redeployed to Newark, N.J.  As expected, chaos followed.

The violence followed increasingly desperate efforts by the detainees of Delaney Hall, a privately-run concentration camp bought and paid for by the Mad King's body snatchers, to attract attention to their suffering, caused by the intentional denial of due process, food, and medical care to these detainees.

If you came in late, and apparently all of you did, none of the incarcerated wretches of Delaney Hall are imprisoned as punishment for crimes of which they have been found guilty.  Everyone is there because of the Mad King's vicious and bigoted efforts to torment persons seeking immigration status in the United States through various pathways established by federal law.

The NJ State Police is aiming for...peace

In a free society, locking people up except as punishment for crimes has been traditionally frowned upon.  In the case of immigrants without or seeking status, detention is authorized only in narrow categories: (1) the detainee is a danger to public safety (like criminal bail), (2) the detainee is a flight risk, (3) the detainee is about to be deported following a removal order or (4) the detainee entered without inspection and was arrested shortly thereafter.

That's it.  That's the list. 

Not a legal basis for detention: tormenting detainees into abandoning their claims for immigration relief.  How could it?  That would be plainly constitutional, or at least it was prior to the 2017-20 packing of the Supreme Court by bent Republicans. 

Which brings us to Delaney Hall, a dismal institution in a grim corner of Newark [What other kinds of corners does Newark have? – Ed.].  Immured inside are 1,000 desperate souls, according to Rep. Rob Menendez, who has toured the lager on multiple occasions:

“There’s no criminals in there,” Menendez said. “You have a daughter who should have been graduating high school. You have a pregnant woman in there. You have a woman who suffered a miscarriage in there. You have fathers, grandfathers, mothers, grandmothers. That’s who ICE is holding in Delaney Hall right now.”  

Good thing these monsters haven't been turned loose to wreak havoc on the quiet peaceful streets of Newark. 

The terrible conditions both in Delaney Hall and in the travesty of justice that constitutes the immigration process, including claims to be released from detention, have also been cited in a letter signed by New Jersey's Senators and six of its Representatives. 

The victims, to call attention to their unbearable plight, began a hunger strike.  According to independent journalist Marisa Kabas, the Mad King's storm troopers responded the only way they know how –  with violence:

Now we’ve learned that ICE agents within Delaney have begun physically retaliating against the hunger strikers: Outside in clear view of cameras, they’ve taken to physically attacking protesters and journalists, pushing one into the wheel of a moving truck and smashing a camera. What’s emerged in Newark is a new front in the battle against Donald Trump’s vicious and deadly immigration policy, and a strong sign that the campaign to abolish and prosecute ICE is alive and well.  

Those interested in human rights have been protesting the outrages at Delaney Hall for years.  But the news of the hunger strike and its brutal suppression brought out a new wave of protests.  As in Minneapolis, those too have been met with state-sponsored violence perpetrated by masked anonymous goon squads, including gassing and spraying New Jersey Senator Andy Kim:

The surge of ICE violence against protesters in the street and detainees trapped inside prompted  calls, including by this publication, for New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill to deploy the New Jersey State Police to protect New Jerseyans.

It was another lesson in being careful what you wish for.  The Governor deployed the State Police not to protect the protesters but to roust them with violence and gas:

It was absolutely necessary to shoot the protesters with pepper balls for their safety

[image or embed]

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) May 30, 2026 at 1:34 PM

 It reminded us of the old explanations American military brass gave for wanton destruction of civilian lives in Vietnam: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Based on her actions, it appears that Gov. Sherrill was less interested in protecting the civil rights of her state's residents than she was in “lowering the temperature.”  It seems that she was worried that if the State Police acted to protect protesters from ICE attack, the Mad King's goons would respond with the kind of brute force they unleashed on Minneapolis.

We have a suggestion for Gov. Sherrill.  You can't appease a sadistic bully by beating up on his victims yourself.  That only incites them.  And it's not the fault of the victims both inside and outside the walls of Delaney Hall.  Thinking that you can help your people by doing the dirty work yourself was the rationalization employed by the Judenraten of occupied Eastern Europe.  It did not go well for the Jews. 

Her explanation for intervening decisively on the side of the bad guys was simple and sad: 

“I will not give ICE the pretext to expand operations in our state,” Ms. Sherrill said during a news conference. “Our top priority is public safety, and we need to take this opportunity to lower the temperature now.” 

Gov. Sherrill may have forgotten that the only pretext ICE found necessary to begin their violent rampage in Minneapolis was a fake video about day care centers.

As for lowering the temperature, she's echoing the white “moderate” reaction to the civil rights protests of the 1960's, some of which included violations of law (like sitting in at a lunch counter or refusing to give up a seat on a city bus).  Back then, those lovable moderates argued that if Black people continued to protest violations of civil rights, Bull Connor will sic the fire hoses and police dogs on innocent civilians.

Given the choice between standing up for justice and the supposed need for peace and tranquillity, Gov. Sherrill chose peace and tranquillity.

So far it's not working:

Good to see @velshi.com out there. This is fucking crazy.

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— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) May 30, 2026 at 11:29 PM

Even more fundamentally, the white moderates of New Jersey have lost the plot. The real problem here is not unarmed protesters at an ICE detention center; it's the ongoing crime against humanity represented by that detention center.  So far nothing concrete has been done, either through legal action or something simpler (like ordering the power cut) to protect the helpless and tormented victims of the body snatchers, acting on orders from a corrupt demented bigot.

Perhaps Gov. Sherrill was intimidated by DHS Secretary Markwayne “Boom-boom” Mullin, who once challenged a union leader to a fistfight during a Senate hearing.

Now Punchy is proposing to retaliate against places like New Jersey by closing down the CBP inspections that allow international arriving passengers to enter the country at Newark Airport.  That would mean that the 700,000 or so passengers arriving each month at Newark Airport from overseas would be rerouted to Red State hubs like Casper International Airport, seen here:

The airport boasts a 10,000-foot runway, so moving all international flights from Newark to Casper, Wyoming should work out fine. 

A reminder that this isn't the first time that Newark chose to confront civil rights protests with excessive force.  No one remembers the 1967 Newark riots protesting generations of racist policing and other government interventions.  At the time all good white people clamored for peace and tranquillity.

The verdict of history, not for use in Florida schools, is different:

Many Americans blamed the riots on outside agitators or young black men, who represented the largest and most visible group of rioters. But, in March 1968, the Kerner Commission turned those assumptions upside-down, declaring white racism—not black anger—turned the key that unlocked urban American turmoil.

Bad policing practices, a flawed justice system, unscrupulous consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression, and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination all converged to propel violent upheaval on the streets of African-American neighborhoods in American cities, north and south, east and west. And as black unrest arose, inadequately trained police officers and National Guard troops entered affected neighborhoods, often worsening the violence.  

As Tom Lehrer used to say about defeating Germany in 1918, “that couldn't happen again.”

But it can, and as long as supposed white moderates like Gov. Sherrill abandon their supposed commitment to civil rights and the rule of law as soon as the going gets tough, it will happen again.

Like the illegally detained victims of the Mad King's bigotry locked up in Delaney Hall without edible food, we're hungry for something better.