Are you unmarried? Are you a Democrat?

You could be in trouble. Those rules that target trans people could be used against you.

VA officials cite the president’s 30 January executive order titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. The primary purpose of the executive order was to strip most government protections from transgender people. The VA has since ceased providing most gender-affirming care and forbidden a long list of words, including “gender affirming” and “transgender”, from clinical settings.

Maybe you thought that executive order was a fine thing. It was hurting trans people, but you aren’t trans, so no worries!

Unfortunately, you didn’t realize that removing civil rights protections from one group opens the door to removing rights from other groups. If you didn’t complain when trans people were criminalized, you don’t get to complain when the fascists pound on your door.

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.

Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity, documents reviewed by the Guardian show. The changes also affect chiropractors, certified nurse practitioners, optometrists, podiatrists, licensed clinical social workers and speech therapists.

Are you single? Are you a Democrat? Have you joined a union? Have you been the vicim of a crime?

They “seem to open the door to discrimination on the basis of anything that is not legally protected”, said Dr Kenneth Kizer, the VA’s top healthcare official during the Clinton administration. He said the changes open up the possibility that doctors could refuse to treat veterans based on their “reason for seeking care – including allegations of rape and sexual assault – current or past political party affiliation or political activity, and personal behavior such as alcohol or marijuana use”./p>

Have you forgotten that civil rights are supposed to protect everyone?

So far, this is only a hypothetical danger. But talk to your gay and trans friends — they’ll tell you how rapidly a hypothetical risk can become an immediate threat to your health and well-being.

Creep

RJ May, a state representative in South Carolina, voted for anti-trans legislation, and then piously declared that

We as legislators have an obligation to insure that our children have no harm done to them.

He was declared Legislator of the Year in 2023 by Moms for Liberty, and was vice chair of the Freedom Caucus. He was a true conservative hero.

Unknown to everyone, though, he had set up an account on KiK, an instant messaging app popular because you don’t have to provide email addresses or phone numbers to sign up, which gives a nice illusion of anonymity. However, if someone uses the service for criminal activity, the police can get the IP addresses used by posters and trace them back to the person.

Guess who was swapping hundreds of images and videos of child pornography under the username joebidennnn69? You guessed it, I’m sure.

RJ May was arrested at his Lexington County home after a lengthy investigation and was ordered Thursday by a federal judge to remain jailed until his trial.

The three-term Republican is accused of using “joebidennnn69” to exchange 220 different files of toddlers and young children involved in sex acts on the Kik social media network for about five days in spring 2024, according to court documents that graphically detailed the videos.

Each charge carries a five-to-20 year prison sentence upon conviction and prosecutors suggested May could spend over a decade in prison if found guilty.

The files were uploaded and downloaded using May’s home Wi-Fi network and his cellphone, prosecutors said. Some were hidden by the use of a private network but others were directly linked to his internet addresses.

He is claiming that he didn’t do it, that someone stole his wifi password. Except…

Prosecutors said they also investigated whether May used a fake name to travel to Colombia three times after finding videos on his laptop of him allegedly having sex with three women. An agent from the Department of Homeland Security testified the women appeared to be underage and were paid. U.S. agents have not been able to locate the women.

Prosecutors said May created a Facebook account with his fake name and his internet history showed him switching between his real account and the fake one and even searching his primary opponent from the fake login.

He is currently being held without bail.

Prosecutors asked that May, 38, not be given bail because he lives at home with his wife and young children, and some of the files he is accused of sharing feature children of about the same age as his.

Every accusation is a confession.

They caught him!

The police caught Vance Boelter. Good. Now we can all forget him forever.

Except for the people whose lives he harmed. Two of them are dead, two were incredibly lucky.

On Sunday evening, US Senator Amy Klobuchar shared a statement from Yvette Hoffman expressing appreciation for the outpouring of public support.

“John is enduring many surgeries right now and is closer every hour to being out of the woods,” Yvette Hoffman said in a text that Klobuchar posted on social media. “He took 9 bullet hits. I took 8 and we are both incredibly lucky to be alive. We are gutted and devastated by the loss of Melissa and Mark.”

Manhunt!

The pursuit of Vance Boelter, the assassin of Melissa Hortman, continues. The rats are scattering.

  • His wife, Jenny Lynn Boelter, was stopped in Onamia, a town well north of Minneapolis. She was not held as a criminal, although she was traveling with passports and weapons.
  • His wife was the president and CEO of Pretorian Guard, the security company Boelter worked at.
  • I have no idea what his personal situation was like, but Boelter lived with two men as roommates, which may mean his wife is off the hook in any conspiracy theory.
  • Before fleeing, Boelter left a message for his roommates.

    David and Ron, I love you guys. I’ve made some choices and you guys don’t know anything about this, but I’m going to be gone for a while. I may be dead shortly. So I just want to let you know that I love you guys both. And wish it hand’s gone this way. I don’t want to say anything more, and implicate you in any way because you guys don’t know anything about this, but I love you guys and I’m sorry for all the trouble this has caused.

    I suspect he’s not going to be caught alive.

  • Some people are claiming that Boelter was a “registered Democrat”. We don’t have party registration in Minnesota!
  • His friends have said he was a strong Trump supporter.

    • Bits of his hit list have been trickling out. He also want to murder ” Governor Tim Walz, US Representative Ilhan Omar, US Senator Tina Smith, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, among others.” Shut the fuck up all you people claiming he was a liberal Democrat.

  • We have him on video preaching in the Democratic Republic of Congo about the evils of homosexuality.
  • Boelter abandoned a car in Sibley, MN — that’s southwest of Minneapolis.

I don’t normally cheer on the cops, but in this case, I’m saying…go get him, boys.

That message he left his roommates says that he knows he has screwed up (I don’t think he regrets the murders, he regrets being caught), so I don’t think he’s going to surrender peacefully.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah is now claiming that Boelter was a Marxist. Absolutely insane.

We know how to really hurt Donald Trump

Tell him that he had a tiny crowd size at his expensive parade.

For an event that shut down much of central Washington D.C., closed key roads, and reportedly cost up to $45 million, the promise of a display of America’s military might — that just coincidentally happened to fall on Trump’s birthday — didn’t exactly draw out legions of his fans. Instead, the crowd of supporters, servicemembers, curious locals, and military-adjacent spectators who braved the oppressive heat and humidity of a post-thunderstorm D.C. managed to just fill out their allotted side of the street over several blocks in front of the White House, with plenty of room to spare.

In front of the central stage, a crowd befitting a midsize concert gathered in view of Jumbotrons. The lawns surrounding the Washington monument — which have hosted countless inaugurations, protests, concerts, and gatherings — were largely unused overflow space.

When the TV broadcast showed the crowd risers along the parade route, they were sparsely filled. The National Park Service issued permits for 250,000 people for the National Mall festival and the military parade. An aerial parade of historic military aircraft flew above the National Mall, traversing a course from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Memorial that — despite clear anticipation of crowds by event organizers — was more empty field and food truck line than crowd.

Though rock music blared on TV, the parade itself was eerily quiet. One video posted on X shows tanks squeaking past nearly silent crowds, sounding like a grocery cart in need of grease.

In the weeks leading up to his birthday and the parade, Trump told close associates that protesters were going to try to overshadow the military parade, including in media coverage, in D.C. and elsewhere, and that he was determined not to let that happen, a source with knowledge of the matter and another person briefed on it tell Rolling Stone.

I will give him this, that he was right about protesters trying to overshadow his parade.

That was the crowd attending the anti-Trump protest in Idaho.

This was San Diego.

He’s an unpopular president. He’s hated.

A dismal way to start the march

We were just beginning to gather the group for our protest march, when we listened to Governor Walz’s announcement about the murders last night.

Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans said the Hoffmans were shot around 2 a.m.

The second shooting, at the Hortman home, happened around 3:35 a.m., with police at the scene exchanging gunfire with the suspect before the suspect fled the scene.

Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley said officers did their “due diligence” to check on Hortman’s home after learning that a lawmaker had earlier been attacked.

“When they arrived at Melissa’s house, they noticed that there was a police vehicle in the driveway with the emergency lights on and what appeared to be a police officer at the door coming out o the house. When our officers confronted him, the individual immediately fired upon officers, which exchanged gunfire and the suspect retreated back into the home.”

The manhunt for the suspect, who was impersonating a police officer, is ongoing and involved “hundreds and hundreds” of officers. The suspect fled through the back door of the home and he is on foot and at large.

The suspect was driving a vehicle that looked “exactly like a police vehicle” and they were wearing a vest with a Taser and police badge. Inside the suspect’s vehicle was a manifesto that identified “many lawmakers and other officials,” including Hortman and Hoffman.

“No question that if they were in this room you would assume that they were a police officer,” Bruley said, acknowledging that investigators have “people of interest that they are looking for.”

“This is a dark day today for Minnesota and for democracy,” Minnesota Department of Public Safety Superintendent Bob Jacobson said.

The two homes were 8 miles apart. There is no doubt that this was an intentional, targeted, political assassination of Democratic lawmakers. They’ve at least seized the cowardly criminal’s car, so we’ll probably learn his identity soon enough.

The protest march went ahead as planned. About a hundred people, a remarkably large event for our little town, marched peacefully and legally through the town. This isn’t notable except that the goddamned chickenshit state police were using the violence as an excuse to shut down rallies all across the state.

State officials are urging Minnesotans to refrain from attending political rallies Saturday amid the backdrop of shocking political violence in the state.

“Given the targeted shootings of state lawmakers overnight, we are asking the public to not attend today’s planned demonstrations across Minnesota out of an abundance of caution,” the Minnesota State Patrol wrote on X.

Walz echoed the message in his own post, writing:

“Out of an abundance of caution my Department of Public Safety is recommending that people do not attend any political rallies today in Minnesota until the suspect is apprehended.”

No. Ten thousand times no. This is precisely the time when we have to stand up against political violence.

And we did.

Time to protest

I’m getting ready to leave the house and join the No Kings protest here in Morris, Minnesota. I read up on recommendations made for other protests — stuff like leave your phone at home, mask up, what to do if there is tear gas, etc. — but it all seems like overkill here. I’ll be about 5 or 6 blocks away from my home, in a small quiet rural town, and I anticipate a well-behaved calm protest, so I hope you’re not expecting dramatic news when I get back. It’s just going to be a small group of citizens expressing their civic responsibility, unlike the Republicans in government.

I still think it’s important for everyone to stand up in resistance, even in situations lacking in drama.

Unfortunately, then I learn this morning that two Democratic state legislators, John Hoffman and Melissa Hortman, were shot overnight by a man dressed as a law enforcement officer. Their spouses were also shot. The shootings were in two different locations, so it seems to be a targeted terrorism attack, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the goal was to intimidate protesters on this day.

It’s all the more reason to get out there and peacefully protest. Don’t let the thugs win.

Gray days

It’s been raining non-stop for the last few days, just an ongoing drizzle, cool and wet.

No spiders. Spiders are not fans of the excessive water falling out of the sky. I’m missing my little friends.

The good news is that the vegetation is going mad, and I expect once it all dries out a bit and the sun warms up the place, we’re going to be swarming with insects, and the spiders will be joyous again.