They’re Flooding The Zone, Again
Donald has tasked his entire administration with the mission of keeping us on our heels.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – The firehose of news is back with a vengeance. It’s Donald’s way of making sure the news media, along with the rest of us, for that matter, don’t have time to absorb and relay any one particular atrocity from his fascistic administration. I think I still have whiplash from what went down on Wednesday alone.
The day began by emphasizing the rank incompetence of the new White House team and ended on a completely different story about the re-emergence of the prison at Guantanamo.
This past weekend, the Trump administration announced an across-the-board freeze on literally all federal grants, including funding for Medicaid, Head Start, state and local governments – a total of 2,600 programs, according to the New York Times.
The apparent freeze on Medicaid funds in particular was the first to generate widespread panic and outrage, especially given that the 72 million Americans who get their healthcare through the program include millions of MAGA Republicans. The portal for reimbursements to doctors shut down almost immediately, only to be reopened by the White House after pushback among citizens and lawmakers.
A federal judge in Washington, DC, Loren AliKhan, put a stop to the freeze on Tuesday. The next day, journalist Marisa Kabas reported that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rescinded the memo implementing the freeze. Shortly after the leaked memo dropped, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted the following tweet, causing mass confusion:
In other words, the memo was rescinded but the executive order was still in place… I guess?. The dummies in the White House thought they could circumvent the courts with this nincompoopery, but another federal judge, John McConnell, said he planned to issue yet another injunction to stop the spending freeze. McConnell said, “The administration is acting with a distinction without a difference.”
All told, it’s another janky edition of the Three Stooges fixing the plumbing. My only concern is that once this is ironed out in the courts, the administration will freeze spending on myriad programs, while the rest of us act relieved they didn’t de-fund Medicaid. Keep an eye on this story.
Nevertheless, Donald’s Project 2025 jalopy was losing its wheels, so it was time to announce something that’d be sure to get us looking the other way. You know how concerned they were about the backlash to the funding freeze because the distraction was almost impossible to avoid.
Guantanamo is back, apparently.
Donald announced that arrested migrants would be moved to the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – the infamous George W. Bush-era prison camp where suspected terrorists were held and tortured. To be clear: he hasn’t signed any such executive order, which adds to my suspicion that this was a desperation move to distract the press from the OMB debacle. It’s also unclear whether it’ll strictly be migrants who commit violent crimes or any undocumented migrant arrested inside the country. He added there are 30,000 beds there, but no one knows for sure.
This raises all sorts of other questions, from potential human rights abuses to the cost of imprisoning migrants, perhaps indefinitely. It’s also such an extreme measure that, once again, a retreat to a lesser position, such as a return to family separation and deportation, would be comparatively palatable.
Would the detained migrants eventually be put on trial? Or would they be held forever? I’d bet on the latter. And how much will it cost to detain 30,000 migrants indefinitely rather than to simply deport them? Will there ever be an actual executive order? Will children be sent there, too? Will they have access to legal representation? We can also bet on the fact that Donald’s team will invent horror stories or exaggerate existing ones about the detainees.
Jesus, here we are again talking about detainees at Gitmo. (By the way, it’d be nice if we could get behind a constitutional amendment banning executive orders for anything other than ceremonial pronouncements. Congress makes the laws, not the president.)
But that’s the idea. Donald has tasked his entire administration with the mission of keeping us on our heels, making sure we don’t have time to process, much less push back against his endless geyser of shit and cruelty.
That said, he doesn’t understand that there are many more of us than there are stooges in his clubhouse. We can delegate and conquer, but we have to stay focused. And while they’re flooding the zone, they’re also ridiculously incompetent, undermining themselves more often than not. So, yes, we’ll have some help. Thanks, Donald, for being a big doofus.
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>> “He added there are 30,000 beds there, but no one knows for sure.” <<
Sure we know for sure. Donny Convict said it so we know for sure it’s a lie.
Plus, roughly 780 detainees have been held at the prison since it opened in 2002. So if it’s never had even 1000 prisoners since it started holding them, why would it suddenly have 30 times that many beds? (Answer: Because Donny just made up ridiculous shit as always.)