Category: Economics / Economy / Income / Financial

Army plans for a potential parade on Trump’s birthday call for 6,600 soldiers, AP learns

https://apnews.com/article/army-parade-trump-birthday-96bb9c8e9af1ef285c56fdc3d1ba4b35

President Donald Trump, pictured on screen from left, French President Emmanuel Macron and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch a Bastille Day parade on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris, July 14, 2017. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

President Donald Trump gestures as he walks from the Oval Office to depart on Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House, Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

By  LOLITA C. BALDOR
Updated 11:49 PM EDT, May 1, 2025

 Detailed Army plans for a potential military parade on President Donald Trump’s birthday in June call for more than 6,600 soldiers, at least 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, seven bands and possibly a couple thousand civilians, The Associated Press has learned.

The planning documents, obtained by the AP, are dated April 29 and 30 and have not been publicly released. They represent the Army’s most recent blueprint for its long-planned 250th anniversary festival on the National Mall and the newly added element — a large military parade that Trump has long wanted but is still being discussed.

The Army anniversary just happens to coincide with Trump’s 79th birthday on June 14.

While the slides do not include any price estimates, it would likely cost tens of millions of dollars to put on a parade of that size. Costs would include the movement of military vehicles, equipment, aircraft and troops from across the country to Washington and the need to feed and house thousands of service members.

High costs halted Trump’s push for a parade in his first term, and the tanks and other heavy vehicles that are part of the Army’s latest plans have raised concerns from city officials about damage to roads.

Asked about plans for a parade, Army spokesman Steve Warren said Thursday that no final decisions have been made.

Col. Dave Butler, another Army spokesman, added that the Army is excited about the plans for its anniversary.

“We want to make it into an event that the entire nation can celebrate with us,” said Butler. “We want Americans to know their Army and their soldiers. A parade might become part of that, and we think that will be an excellent addition to what we already have planned.”

Others familiar with the documents, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans have not been finalized, said they represent the Army’s plans as it prepares for any White House approval of the parade. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There has been no formal approval yet. Changes to the plans have been made in recent weeks and more are likely.

In a Truth Social post Thursday night that did not mention the June 14 plans, Trump wrote, “We are going to start celebrating our victories again!” He vowed to rename May 8, now known as Victory in Europe Day, as “Victory Day for World War II,” and to change November 11, Veterans Day, to “Victory Day for World War I.”

What would go into the potential Army parade

Much of the equipment would have to be brought in by train or flown in.

Some equipment and troops were already going to be included in the Army’s birthday celebration, which has been in the works for more than a year. The festival was set to involve an array of activities and displays on the National Mall, including a fitness competition, climbing wall, armored vehicles, Humvees, helicopters and other equipment.

A parade, however, would increase the equipment and troops involved. According to the plans, as many as 6,300 of the service members would be marching in the parade, while the remainder would be responsible for other tasks and support.

The Army’s early festival plans did not include a parade, but officials confirmed last month that the Army had started discussions about adding one.

The plans say the parade would showcase the Army’s 250 years of service and foresee bringing in soldiers from at least 11 corps and divisions nationwide. Those could include a Stryker battalion with two companies of Stryker vehicles, a tank battalion and two companies of tanks, an infantry battalion with Bradley vehicles, Paladin artillery vehicles, Howitzers and infantry vehicles.

There would be seven Army bands and a parachute jump by the Golden Knights. And documents suggest that civilian participants would include historical vehicles and aircraft and two bands, along with people from veterans groups, military colleges and reenactor organizations.

According to the plan, the parade would be classified as a national special security event, and that request has been submitted by the National Park Service and is under review.

And it is expected that the evening parade would be followed by a concert and fireworks.

One of the documents raises concerns about some limitations, which include where troops would be housed and “significant concerns regarding security requirements” as equipment flows into the city. It says the biggest unknown so far is which units would be participating.

Trump has long wanted a big military parade

In his first term, Trump proposed having a parade after seeing one in France on Bastille Day in 2017. Trump said that after watching the two-hour procession along the famed Champs-Elysees that he wanted an even grander one on Pennsylvania Avenue.

That plan was ultimately dumped due to the huge costs — with one estimate of a $92 million price tag — and other logistical issues. Among those were objections from city officials who said including tanks and other heavy armored vehicles would tear up the roads.

Trump said in a social media post in 2018 that he was canceling the event over the costs and accused local politicians of price gouging.

This year, as plans progressed for the Army to host its birthday festival in Washington, talk about a parade began anew.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser acknowledged in April that the administration reached out to the city about holding a parade on June 14 that would stretch from Arlington, Virginia, where the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery are located, across the Potomac River and into Washington.

Bowser at the time said she didn’t know if the event was being “characterized as a military parade” but added that tanks rolling through the city’s streets “would not be good.”

“If military tanks were used, they should be accompanied with many millions of dollars to repair the roads,” she said.

In 2018, the Pentagon appeared to agree. A memo from the defense secretary’s staff said plans for the parade — at that time — would include only wheeled vehicles and no tanks to minimize damage to local infrastructure.

LOLITA C. BALDOR
LOLITA C. BALDOR
Baldor has covered the Pentagon and national security issues for The Associated Press since 2005. She has reported from all over the world including warzones in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Shocking Moments You Missed In The Oval Office! | Christopher Titus Bonus Armageddon Update

Clay Jones on POTUS 5/2

MAGA Grouch by Clay Jones

Trump stinks Read on Substack

After seeing this cartoon, my friend John Kovalic wrote, “Sesame Street is brought to you today by the letter ‘F’ and the number 47.”

Late last night (Thursday), Donald Trump issued another illegal executive order, with this one ordering the board of directors for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to “cease federal funding for NPR and PBS” because Trump claims they’re woke and liberally biased.

The problem with liberal bias is that facts have a liberal bias. If everything you say is a lie and everything you do is corrupt, illegal, sick, depraved, inhumane, racist, and fucked up, then factual reporting is not your friend.

Trump can’t do anything official against the free press, but he can put his weight on them, which seems to be working on The Washington Post and CBS News, but he can meddle with government programs…to an extent.

The order says, “Neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens. The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”

The good news is, the government will continue to fund Trump’s golf games.

PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger called it a “blatantly unlawful Executive Order, issued in the middle of the night.” The middle of the night is when authoritarian governments tend to do their best work, like sending stormtroopers to break down your door, drag every member of your family out, and then put them in a train cattle car.

CPB issued a statement saying, “CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”

I bet Trump’s thinking that’s the kind of biased reporting that is costing PBS and NPR their funding. He’s probably also thinking, “Respect my authority!”

The CPB noted that the statute Congress passed to create it “expressly forbade any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”

Congress said that such funds “may be used at the discretion of the recipient” for producing or acquiring programs to put on the air.

Trump has already asked Congress to rescind funds already approved for public broadcasting. Fascists always murder a free press.

CPB is already suing the regime over Trump’s executive order seeking to fire three of its five board members.

Trump recently attacked PBS and NPR on his platform ShitSocial, saying, “REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!”

Does Big Bird look like a radical left monster?

Conservatives have been howling for years that NPR and PBS are liberally biased while the progressive group Fair (Fairness in Accuracy in Reporting) once issued a report blasting PBS and NPR for being too conservative.

That’s the thing with the media. It’s never conservative enough for conservatives or liberal enough for liberals.

We got that complaint all the time when I was at The Free Lance-Star. Our page at that time was conservative, but we ran liberal columns and my pinko and unpatriotic cartoons. My editors sought balance, but there was still more conservative content than liberal, yet the conservatives still howled.

Each week, Politico publishes what they call the “Cartoon Carousel,” which is a collection of cartoons from the past week (USA Today and The Washington Post both used to do this, but they stopped). It too seeks balance and publishes an equal number of conservative and liberal cartoons, which means half the cartoons suck. I support diversity in news content, but I hate when it’s chosen over quality.

Now, one of those who complain irrationally about balance is in the White House, and he’ll abuse his power to do things the Constitution doesn’t give him the power to do.

Trump’s first 100 days have been a total disaster. Defunding public broadcasting is the kind of messed up crap we can expect for the next 100 days and every day after that until we get this orange ogre out of the White House.

Creative note: My brain was slow-moving today, and I have about ten subjects written down to choose from. Sometimes it’s harder to choose your subject than it is to write the cartoon. When you have a long list of subjects, it’s nice when you can combine two of them, which I did today. Oscar came to me around noon. I need to move on to those other subjects, but while writing this blog, I got a great idea featuring Bert and Ernie.

Music note: Have you ever noticed that the Sesame Street theme is the same song as Sunshine Day by The Brady Bunch?

Drawn in 30 seconds: From TikTok, and with music. (snip-MORE)

© 2025 Clay Jones

Children’s March in Birmingham, & Poor People’s Campaign in Peace & Justice History for 5/2

May 2, 1963
Hundreds of children ranging in age from six to eighteen were arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, as they marched from Kelly Ingram Park, across from 16th Street Baptist Church, to downtown singing, “We Shall Overcome.”Part of an ongoing effort to end segregation in that city, and following the arrests of many adults including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the children had volunteered to minimize the threat to families if a breadwinner were jailed. A judge had issued an order preventing any of 133 civil rights leaders from organizing a demonstration.

Birmingham, the capital of Alabama, had been the site of 18 unsolved bombings in black neighborhoods over recent years, and the place where mobs had attacked Freedom Riders on Mother’s Day in 1961. Leaving the park in groups of fifty, the kids were put in vans by police, led by Eugene “Bull” Connor, until there were 959 filling the city jails.
May 2, 1968

The Poor People’s Campaign began with groups from several locations around the U.S. setting out for Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the living conditions of the poorest Americans. It was conceived and organized by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and, following his assassination the previous month, led by his successor at the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Reverend Ralph David Abernathy.
The first wave of demonstrators arrived in Washington on May 11. One week later, Resurrection City was built on the Washington Mall, a settlement of tents and shacks to house the protesters.

Resurrection CityA
Read more 
Note From Ali in 2025:
Not a dream, and while not yet fulfilled, the goal is not unfulfilled (“A Dream Unfulfilled” from the link above,) as The Poor People’s Campaign is still very active, operating in many US states. See if there’s a committee near you!

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorymay.htm#may2

Some more news items I want to share. These are only small quotes there is much more to each story if you follow the links

Trump’s Attack on ActBlue’s “Dark Money” Was Backed by Elon Musk’s Dark Money

Trump’s Attack on ActBlue’s “Dark Money” Was Backed by Elon Musk’s Dark Money

The billionaire helped fund an effort to gin up fraud claims against the Democratic donation platform.

Trump’s claim that he can order the Justice Department to investigate a fundraising platform used by his political foes based on vague allegations is part of his ongoing effort to use the government’s powers to target political enemies. It’s not a particularly realistic accusation—the fact sheet claims it’s targeting “straw donor” schemes, in which one person donates on behalf of another. Given the fairly strict limitations on campaign contributions, any straw donor scheme that wants to inject any noticeable amount of money into an electoral system that had $15.5 billion run through it is a great deal of tedious, high-risk work for a scammer.

On the other hand, in the post-Citizens United era, there are plenty of ways to inject unaccounted-for money—even, theoretically, foreign money—into the election. Super-PACs can accept unlimited donations from fairly easy-to-obscure sources, for instance, which makes the idea of anyone using a small-dollar conduit like ActBlue (or the GOP equivalent WinRed) fairly silly.

And notably, the funding for some of Trump’s “data” on an alleged ActBlue “fraud” seems to have come from just such a source: a super-PAC bankrolled by Elon Musk.

Last year, an opaque group called the Fair Election Fund began promising to pay “whistleblowers” who cited election fraud “with payment from our $5 million fund.” That never panned out, but the same organization found more success with a claim that 60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July Federal Election Commission report did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.

As Mother Jones reported last year, the Fair Election Fund appears to have generated this finding by blasting out ominous-sounding texts and emails telling ActBlue donors that their donations had been “flagged,” then tallying people who responded—accurately or not—by checking a box saying they did not recall making the contribution.

More at the link above

Israel carrying out ‘live-streamed genocide’ in Gaza, Amnesty says

Amnesty accuses US President Donald Trump of committing a ‘multiplicity of assaults’ on human rights.

Israel is perpetrating a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza, committing illegal acts with the “specific intent” of wiping out Palestinians, Amnesty International has said.

Israeli forces in Gaza have violated the United Nations Genocide Convention with acts that include “causing serious bodily or mental harm to civilians” and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction”, the human rights organisation said in its annual report released on Monday.

Israeli air strikes have also frequently hit civilians who were following evacuation orders, while its forces continued to “arbitrarily detain and, in some cases, forcibly disappear Palestinians”, the rights group said.

DOGE has made a big impact on Washington. But government spending is up.

Elon Musk and his shadowy “tech support” team have ripped through Washington, reshaping the government and culling the federal workforce with astonishing speed and scope.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/29/doge-impact-washington-spending-100days-00316587

Nearly a quarter of a million workers have or are expected to leave their federal jobs. That includes more than 112,000 federal workers who have opted into the deferred resignation program, according to a POLITICO analysis of previous reporting and conversations with administration officials. It also includes some 121,000 workers across agencies who have been fired, according to a CNN analysis.

DOGE has hollowed out or shut down 11 federal agencies and says it has terminated more than 8,500 contracts and 10,000 grants. It has wiped out foreign aid and volunteerism in the U.S., slashed education spending and made sweeping changes to the way the government makes procurements, hires contractors and shares data.

DOGE, after promising $2 trillion in savings, now says it has saved the government $160 billion. But even these reported savings, so far, have not led to any meaningful decline in total government spending this year, according to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, which tracks weekly Treasury data.

In fact, the government has actually been spending more compared to this time last year, the model found.

Total spending rose by 6.3 percent, or $156 billion since Trump took office, compared to the first four months of 2024, said Kent Smetters, a Wharton professor who directs the model. Even when accounting for inflation, the federal government has still added $81.2 billion more spending to its books compared to the same period last year, he added.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

https://www.gocomics.com/saturday-morning-breakfast-cereal/2025/05/01

Two From Werd.io: About An EV, And More

 The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen

[Tim Stevens at The Verge]

It’s rare these days that I see a new product and think, this is really cool, but seriously, this is really cool:

“Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.”

So far, so bland, but it’s designed to be customized. So while it doesn’t itself come with a screen, or, you know, paint, you can add one yourself, wrap it in whatever color you want, and pick from a bunch of aftermarket devices to soup it up. It’s the IBM PC approach to electric vehicles instead of the highly-curated Apple approach. I’m into it, with one caveat: I want to hear more about how safe it is.

It sounds like that might be okay:

“Slate’s head of engineering, Eric Keipper, says they’re targeting a 5-Star Safety Rating from the federal government’s New Car Assessment Program. Slate is also aiming for a Top Safety Pick from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.”

I want more of this. EVs are often twice the price or more, keeping them out of reach of regular people. I’ve driven one for several years, and they’re genuinely better cars: more performant, easier to maintain, with a smaller environmental footprint. Bringing the price down while increasing the number of options feels like an exciting way to shake up the market, and exactly the kind of thing I’d want to buy into.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating – so let’s see what happens when it hits the road next year.

#Technology

[Link]

=====================

 Trump ‘Alarmists’ Were Right. We Should Say So.

[Toby Buckle at LiberalCurrents]

This resonates for me too.

About the Tea Party, the direction the Republican Party took during the Obama administration, and then of Trump first riding down the escalator to announce his candidacy:

“If you saw in any of this a threat to liberal democracy writ large, much less one that could actually succeed, you were looked at with the kind of caution usually reserved for the guy screaming about aliens on the subway.”

And yet, of course, it got a lot worse.

The proposal here is simple:

“I propose we promote a simple rule for these uncertain times: Those who saw the danger coming should be listened to, those who dismissed us should be dismissed. Which is to say that those of us who were right should actively highlight that fact as part of our argument for our perspective. People just starting to pay attention now will not have the bandwidth to parse a dozen frameworks, or work backwards through a decade of bitter tit-for-tat arguments. What they might ask—what would be very sensible and reasonable of them to ask—is who saw this coming?”

Because you could see it coming, and it was even easy to see, if you shook yourself out of a complacent view that America’s institutions were impermeable, that its ideals were real and enduring, and that there was no way to overcome the norms, checks, and balances that had been in place for generations.

What this piece doesn’t quite mention but is also worth talking about: there are communities for whom those norms, checks, and balances have never worked, and they were sounding the alarm more clearly than anyone else. They could see it. Of course they could see it. So it’s not just about listening to leftists and activists and people who have been considered to be on the political fringe, but also people of color, queer communities, and the historically oppressed. They know this all rather well.

#Democracy

[Link]

On The Phone-

Crank Yankers by Clay Jones

Cranking Trump’s Yank Read on Substack

Shedeur Sanders, who played quarterback for the University of Colorado, and his father, Deion Sanders, who is the head coach, was predicted by draft experts to be selected in the first round. Many saw him going to the Saints, who had the ninth pick, and who need not just a quarterback to build the franchise around, but also immediately. The concern for Saints fans, which I’m one of, was that he wouldn’t still be around at number nine.

On Thursday night, the Saints were on the board just as I was in line to get on my plane in Chicago. I was able to see who the Saints selected before my plane took off, and it was Kelvin Banks, an offensive tackle from the University of Texas. It will be his job in the near future to protect the Saints quarterback, who will NOT be Shedeur Sanders.

Then Sanders started falling and was even available to the Saints when their next pick came up, number 40 in the second round. And they did select a quarterback in the second…who was NOT Shedeur Sanders. They selected Tyler Shough from Louisville. The Saints selected four more players before Shedeur was taken in the fifth round by the Cleveland Browns.

During Shedeur’s free fall to the fifth round before the Browns ended his suffering, he got a phone call. He received a call during the second round from someone claiming to be Mickey Loomis, the general manager of the Saints, who said he was about to draft him.

It was a prank call.

Shedeur later said he knew it was a prank because no one is supposed to have his number, but he didn’t know. You see in the video that he’s clearly distressed from it while having a draft party with his friends and family. So, how did the prankster get the number? (snip-MORE)

‘We’re citizens!’: Oklahoma City family traumatized after ICE raids home, but they weren’t suspects

https://kfor.com/news/local/were-citizens-oklahoma-city-family-traumatized-after-ice-raids-home-but-they-werent-suspects/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJ_QL1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFHRjV0Y2EwTnI4R2pqMVI2AR4zcnV54IV6xDFtZ-JOWbTSuWUuEbqjxQ6L9UtKOYQqJcYHbnAMbUUbj-GG_A_aem_BSYWD8eZJzFS9TH_rbpK5g

ICE is a thug unit run by a major thug.   This family was badly mistreated, in some ways brutalized.   I read earlier where the mother said the 20 ICE agents who broke into their home with no warring then wanted the women, one adult and the others teenagers to remove their clothing in front of them to get dressed before being forced outside in the rain.   The report said the mother refused saying even her husband had not seen the children nude and she did not want them to do that in front of these men.  They were ordered in their “underwear” outside in the rain where they were kept for hours.   Is this the government / police any way people should be treated by law enforcement in the US.  They so disrespected this family sure in the fact they were correct with no room for any doubt.  They had no empathy, no common sense.  In the time I was an axillary sheriff’s deputy we were trained never to act like that.  We were taught to respect the rights of people but be aware they might be lying and the danger of the situation.   Respect the rights of the people.  All people on US soil, in the country regardless of status have due process rights.   The right wing haters want to tell you that if you are here illegally you have no rights but SCOTUS has repeatedly said every person here does.  Hugs  

As for Marissa’s phones, electronics, and cash, they have no idea which agency has those belongings or how to get those items back.  

by: 

Posted: 

Updated: 

Update: 4.30.25

At this time, there is not a fundraising campaign set up for the family. KFOR will share any details if that happens.

Original:

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — A woman says her family’s fresh start in Oklahoma turned into a nightmare after federal immigration agents raided their home, taking their phones, laptops, and life savings – even though they were not the suspects the agents were looking for.

The agents had a search warrant for the home, but the suspects listed on the warrant do not live in the house.

The woman who actually lives in the house had just moved to Oklahoma City from Maryland with her family about two weeks earlier.

The woman, who News 4 will refer to as “Marisa”, and her three daughters came to Oklahoma looking for a slower, more affordable pace of life.

They rented a house in a seemingly safe northwest Oklahoma City neighborhood.

Her husband stayed back in Maryland a couple of extra weeks, planning to join them this weekend.

“I was like, ‘okay, Oklahoma’s my home now,’” Marisa said.

But any comfort they had disappeared Thursday morning when about 20 men, armed with guns, busted through the door.

“I don’t know who they were,” she said. “It was dark. All the lights were off.”

Marisa said the men identified themselves as federal agents with the U.S. Marshals, ICE, and the FBI.

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service denied having agents present during the raid, telling News 4 they were “aware of the operation before it happened,” but did not assist in any capacity.

“I keep asking them, ‘who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening,’” she said. “And they said, ‘we have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”

She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.

“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”

Marisa said the names on the search warrant were not hers or anyone in her family.

She recognized them as names listed on mail still arriving at the house—likely former residents.

“We just moved here from Maryland,” she said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”

She said the agents didn’t care.

“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”

Marisa said the agents tore apart every square inch of the house and what few belongings they had, seizing their phones, laptops and their life savings in cash as “evidence.”

“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” she said. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”

Before they left, Marisa said one of the agents made a comment.

“One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning,’” she said. “It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was a little rough? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow.”

Now, Marisa said they have, quite literally, nothing.

“I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” she said.

Marisa said she is left with nothing but questions.

“What if I would have been armed,” she said. “You’re breaking in. What am I supposed to think? My initial thought was we were being robbed—that my daughters, being females, were being kidnapped. You have guns pointed in our faces. Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women? A little bit of mercy. Care a little bit about your fellow human, about your fellow citizen, fellow resident. We bleed too. We work. We bleed just like anybody else bleeds. We’re scared. You could see our faces that we were terrified. What makes you so much more worthier of your peace? What makes you so much more worthier of protecting your children? What makes you so much more worthy of your citizenship? What makes you more worthy of safety? Of being given the right that they took from me to protect my daughters?”

Marisa told News 4 the agents wouldn’t even leave her a business card.

She said she has no idea who to contact to get her things back.

Marissa told KFOR the U.S. Marshal’s Service and the FBI were involved in this raid.

However, a representative for the U.S. Marshal’s Service says their team was not involved.

News 4 reached out to the FBI. Last week, a spokesperson said they were assisting on this case and directed inquiries to Homeland Security.

A spokesperson for Homeland Security told News 4 they are looking into it and will get back to us, but we have not heard from them.

As for Marissa’s phones, electronics, and cash, they have no idea which agency has those belongings or how to get those items back.

 

“Open Windows” and Clay Jones

Slapshot by Clay Jones

That ship’s gonna sink Read on Substack

If they weren’t so pathetic, you might could possibly be sad for some MAGAts. Take Juanita Broaddrick as an example, whose entire national profile is built upon debunked claims she was raped by Bill Clinton in the 1970s and who is now a full-fledged lying MAGAt.

After Canada’s Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre distanced himself from Donald Trump, Broaddrick claimed he would lose the election because Canada loved Trump so much, which didn’t make any sense.

If Canadians loved Trump so much, then why did they just elect Liberal Mark Carney to become their new Prime Minister? That’s like denying Trump’s current favorability numbers. They suck.

There’s also the fact that Trump lost this election for the Conservatives. The Conservatives were ahead by double digits when Trump entered office last January, then he started barking at Canada, waged a tariff war, and repeatedly insulted them by claiming they should be America’s 51st state.

If Donald Trump had kept his mouth shut and had waited at least 100 days for his stupid tariff war, Poilievre would be Prime Minister today.

Yesterday, thanks to Donald Trump, Canadian Liberals won. Trump is now internationally toxic. Everything Trump touches…dies. Super Bowl champion running back Sequon Barkley played golf with Trump a few days ago, and now I expect his knees to give out during the preseason. Trump is poison. I would tell you to ask Elon, but he hasn’t figured it out yet.

Pierre didn’t just lose his race for Prime Minister, he also lost his seat in parliament. (snip-MORE)

A four-year old cancer patient deported by Ann Telnaes

The boy and his sister, both U.S. citizens, were deported to Honduras with their undocumented mother Read on Substack

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/4/28/us_citizen_children_expelled_from_country