Californication🔥😱 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱🔥 

California Nightmare:  Though New York comes close, the state that riles Trump the most is California. It’s the home of lots of liberal actors who regularly diss him and it’s led by a governor whose GQ looks make Trump’s faux orange face and whipped up coiffure look even more pathetic and ridiculous than they are.  It’s Nancy Pelosi’s home, and even though it has nine Republican members of Congress, it’s 54 electoral college votes and two Senate seats are reliably Democrat. There are somewhere around 1.7 million undocumented immigrants in California, around 900,000 in the Los Angeles County area. They work as domestics, as gardeners, in agriculture, manufacturing, and construction where they are helping to rebuild the fire ravaged parts of Los Angeles some of them in Santa Monica, the part of LA where the immigrant hating Trump advisor Stephen Miller who has been pressing the INS to meet increasingly high daily deportation quotas was raised. The week began with Trump threatening to defund California, to punish Governor Newsom for a 16-year-old transgender athlete’s two track and field victories, a threat that had more to do with distracting from Trump’s failure to negotiate any real tariff agreements, the escalation of hostilities in those areas of the world that he promised to “solve” on day one, and his Musk break-up than anything else because when things are going bad scream about transgender athletes and when that’s enough, have threatening masked INS guys conduct raids and round-up thousands of migrants, especially those hanging outside of Home Depot stores looking for construction day work, and showing up for scheduled immigration check-ins, and students on their way to high school graduations and, of course, claim that they are all violent gang members living off of government subsidies. Then when community members get upset about the rounding up of their friends and relatives, and when one of those protesting the round-ups who also happens to be the head of the head of the Service Employees International Union of California is arrested and injured, express shock and disgust about the “violence” that follows and call up the National Guard, threaten to call in the rest of the military too and have Ex-Fox guy/ Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth freshen his make-up and repeat the threat. Sadly, nothing about what is happening in Los Angeles is shocking because wannabe king Trump promised to arrest and deport millions and mused about calling up the military during his campaign, so here we are.  It’s going to get worse, not just in California.  Trump’s big military parade/birthday party takes place on June 14. Lots of military hardware and soldiers with guns, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth in the mix. What could possibly go wrong? 

People:  ABC journalist Terry Moran was suspended over the weekend for posting harsh words about Stephen Miller saying that what’s interesting about him is not that he’s the brains of “world-class hater” Trump’s operation but its “bile.”  It’s hard to miss that ABC punished him preemptively over fears that they’ll be sued again. We’re only 140 days into Trump 2.0 and the mainstream media is falling. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, one of the migrants deported to the El Salvador gulag, is back in the US.  Though Trump insisted that he couldn’t bring him back, El Salvador President Bukele said he was returned because Trump asked. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously promised that Garcia would never be brought back to the US, announced Garcia’s return during a press conference where she also detailed all of the “crimes” he’d allegedly committed. Curiously, those “crimes,” only two of which were listed on the indictment handed down by a Tennessee grand jury, were discovered after Garcia had been unlawfully deported and none of the others involved in the crimes were charged.  Also curious, Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee who served for fifteen years in both Republican and Democratic administrations, resigned on May 21, the same day that the Garcia indictment was handed down.  Schrader’s resignation was “prompted” by his concerns that the case was against Garcia was being pursued for political reasons.  While Musk is gone, probably for good, some of his DOGE-rats remain, including the infamous “Big Balls” who at least for now is a permanent employee of the General Service Administration.  The Wall Street Journal reports that many of the DOGE-niks, whether they’ve got permanent gigs in government or not,  now fear that their association with Musk will cost them their jobs because their loyalty to Trump is being questioned. Cue the violins 🎻 🎻 🎻.  We should also be questioning their competence, over the weekend the Washington Post reported that “Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process,” among others. It shouldn’t be surprising that a number of those being asked to return are wary of rejoining, that those who’ve been able to find new jobs elsewhere are expressing no interest, and that some rejoining plan to leave as soon as they find a job elsewhere.  Unfortunately, the SCOTUS conservatives don’t really care who is running DOGE these days, at least for now they are fine with all of our private information, including everything that the Social Security Administration has,  going into their hands.

Politics:  The Senate is still working on their version of the Big “Ugly” bill.  A number of House Republicans who voted for the House version of the bill now claim that they didn’t know what was in it and won’t vote for it when it comes back to the House if certain components remain though they’ll probably all will.  Texas Republican John Cornyn who is up for reelection to the Senate in 2026, is currently polling 22 points behind his Republican challenger Ken Paxton, the state’s very Trumpy Attorney General.  

Oops:  Mifepristone, the important abortion drug that anti-abortion activists hate, was first approved for use in the US in 2000, way before the 2020 that I mistakenly typed last week.

#BringThemAllHomeNow