• The Trump administration is rendering unto Caesar:
The Treasury Department is considering minting a $1 coin bearing President Donald Trump’s likeness on both sides to honor him and commemorate the United States’ 250th birthday next year.
A first draft of that coin, which will mark the semiquincentennial anniversary of the nation’s founding, depicts Trump’s head in profile on one side, above the words “IN GOD WE TRUST” and the dates 1776 and 2026.
Canada has the Loonie, and soon America will have a Loonie of its own.
Is this ridiculous egomania? Obviously. Is it legal? Goodness, no — not even if the six corrupt Supreme Court justices invent some new doctrine to claim it might be.
My guess is this coin won’t actually happen, but that immense resources will be spent to mock up some samples to stroke the tender feelings of the Mad King/ Because the lackies he has installed throughout the government find it easier to pretend to follow his weird whims than they do to ever tell him “No, the law doesn’t allow that.”
It will be interesting to watch this play out among Trump’s most-devoted followers in white evangelicalism. They’re not usually big on church history and “tradition,” but this will have them reviving centuries old distinctions from the Iconoclastic Controversy, seeking cover in the claim that they are venerating, but not technically worshipping, their idol. Or maybe they won’t even bother with that.
• Federal goons ransacked an apartment building in Chicago, detaining everyone — citizen and immigrant alike — and stealing their stuff. The “Homeland Security” pretext for the raid was suspicion of Venezuelan gang activity in the building, and “Homeland Security” officials say they arrested two people in the raid who belonged to a gang. “Homeland Security” officials also claim that those two arrests justified breaking down every door in the building, dragging naked zip-tied children into U-Haul vans, and detaining dozens of citizens at gunpoint in the middle of the night.
Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.
When he got home from work, Jones said he entered his unit to find all of his electronics and furniture missing, and all of his clothes and shoes thrown on the floor. Jones said he had no idea who took his belongings and hadn’t received answers from Chicago police. …
In the South Shore raid, neighbors said federal agents used flashbang grenades to burst through the building and several drones and helicopters were deployed.
Ebony Sweets Watson, who lives across the street, said it “looked like hundreds” of agents were outside her front door.
Watson said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers, she said.
“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Watson. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
Watson said she went into the building to help one of the residents and was shocked by what she saw.
“Stuff was everywhere,” said Watson. “You could see people’s birth certificates, and papers thrown all over. Water was leaking into the hallway. It was wicked crazy.”
The local news station has more horrifying details:
ABC7 spoke to Pertissue Fisher, a woman who lives in the building. She said ICE agents took everyone in the building, including her, and asked questions later.
“They just treated us like we were nothing,” Fisher said.
Fisher said she came out to the hallway of her apartment complex on the corner of 75th and South Shore Drive in her nightgown around 10 p.m. Monday only to find armed ICE agents yelling “police.”
“It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face,” Fisher said. “They asked my name and my date of birth and asked me, did I have any warrants? And I told them, ‘No,’ I didn’t.”
Fisher said she was handcuffed before being released around 3 a.m., and she was told that if anyone had any kind of warrant out for them, even if it was unrelated to immigration, they would not be released.
… Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson said. “That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.'”
The Venezuelan immigrants seized in the raid by federal slavecatchers were “illegal immigrants.” We know they are “illegal” because the Trump administration stripped away the legal status of Venezuelan immigrants by imperial fiat. Hundreds of thousands of people who came here legally and were obeying the law had the law changed out from under them. Because “f*** them kids.”
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