Week of ICE Troops Rioting
Shooting Pretti in the back, Fox covers, Administration Lies, Trump conditional empathy, 2^nd Amendment, Guns, Put ICE on ice, Politics of ICE, MAGA rage, Greenland

ICU nurse Alex Pretti was rushing to assist a woman who had just been knocked down by ICE agents.

Ted documents the killing with 7 photos from videos leading up to the fatal shootings beginning at 48 seconds before the first shot.

Tommy Christopher brings us a CNN interview with a nearby witness to the Alex Pretti killing.

She relates some of how he was handled seconds after he was dead.

Grung_e_Gene remembers his long ago training as a rookie officer learning how to handle a discovered weapon during an arrest.

Contributing factor:
What’s clear is ICE have been given standing orders to escalate every situation, to engage in maximum confrontation and use maximum force at all times with protestors, witnesses, and migrants. This is evidenced by every recorded ICE interaction you see where they engage in maximum intimidation and threats and buttressed by the verbal support of “absolute immunity” J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller have repeated shouted whenever possible.

And an inevitable conclusion:

He sees an obvious pattern:

Obvious truth:
I suppose that “Videos of the deadly Minneapolis shooting of Alex Pretti show the government is lying” would be too much.

Hackwhackers counters with Joan Walsh and those who knew him best, describing the latest ICE victim as a good man at a time of great evil.

Stephen Miller seems to be confessing his own incompetence

…not to bring guns to protests, but schools are still okay.

…secretly paying Alex Pretti to be a model citizen

Key tragedies:
It is as tragic and frightening as any day in my lifetime:
 
The complete disregard for his life by those thugs cosplaying as soldiers is beyond comprehension.
 
The utter contempt for his memory by this Administration is unrepentantly evil.
 
And what soon followed by supposedly patriotic, Jesus-following Conservative Americans is sadly predictable.

…to be replaced by the goofy looking, goofy sounding, goof acting new ICE boss, Tom Homan.

Commonality:
Isn’t it remarkable how so many of the Trump acolytes are like goofy comic book villains, with their ready suite of silly features? It’s Dick Tracy or Batman all over again.

She can now find a connection to a frequent ICE tactic, as they bravely attack little kids while the kids scream for help.

On morally obtuse responses:
They lie and they smear the victim. Kristi Noem, as despicable a person as Stephen Miller, made false claims about the confiscated gun, the circumstances and smeared the dead man with an accusation that he was out to “massacre law enforcement”.

Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky was the only Congressional Republican who voted NO in protest over ICE killings and assaults.

Almost all Congressional Democrats voted against funding DHS. There were seven exceptions.

Author and educator Amanda Nelson talks about each of the seven, their excuses, and the prospect of primarying each out of office and the wisdom of trying.

In Nan’s Notebook Nan is irritated at the bland tone, the lack of appropriate outrage.

Senator Schumer’s main objection:
the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.

Nan’s objection to the objection:
How totally weak and insipid. (I’m a lady, so I won’t insert the descriptive words I would prefer to use.)
 
Good grief! An innocent man was just MURDERED by government THUGS!!

I dunno. Senator Schumer may threaten to write another very strong letter asking more very stern questions.

Key fix:
The Associated Press captured this picture of the top Democratic appropriator, Rosa DeLauro, celebrating the completion of the full bundle of appropriations bills—including for DHS—with her Republican counterpart Tom Cole. She went on to “vote no,” like Jeffries, but the clear intent was to ensure passage.

Steve Bannon on Alex Pretti:
[Pretti] knew exactly what he was doing and he knew the consequences. The violent domestic terrorist mob in the streets of Minneapolis needs to stand down now.

The public is reacting, instead, to what they see:
MAGA adherents are embracing the daft idea that the Minnesota people who have come together to protect their neighbors are an organized, paid insurgency.
 
But the tide seems to be running against them.

The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.

Headline clue:
The Trumptanic hits the ICE berg

tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors points to Trump saying he has found a special grief for Renee Good after hearing her parents were Trump fans.

MAGAFolk, he reasons, are not possessed by anger. They are captives of rage.

Sacrifices
Small Denmark – much maligned by Trump – with 44 of its soldiers losing their lives, suffered almost the same death toll as the United States on a per-capita basis. Another eight Danish troops were killed in Iraq.
 
The United Kingdom lost 457 of its finest in Afghanistan, closely following Denmark on a per capita basis. In addition, approximately 2,000 British military and civilian personnel were wounded there.
 
Other NATO allies, including Canada, suffered a total of more than 500 military fatalities.

Derision:
“We’ve never needed them,” Trump said of non-U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, “We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, little off the frontlines.”

Key theology:
The act of God coupled with His blistering pronouncement left many atheists reconsidering their positions, nonbelievers reported.

…to stone a man for picking up sticks on the sabbath.

Naive headline:
BEHOLD I AM OLD

Great entertainment:
If I had to describe, in one word, the fun and excitement of being a professional journalist at the winter games, that word would be “unpleasant bus rides.”

Unique competitions:
Once I even got to try my hand at an actual Olympic event, namely curling. This is a sport that originated in Scotland in the 16th century, when some Scottish people, who we can assume were pretty hammered, discovered that if you slid a heavy stone along a frozen surface, and then ran next to the stone frantically sweeping the ice with a broom, you would look like an idiot.