March 1, 2024 - Biden, Trump agree on threat of non-existent invasion
… Texas border … Texas wildfires … home cameras … rich tax cheats …
Trump, Biden Brave the Front Lines of Fictional Invasion
Ignoring some real invasions that pose actual dangers, Pres. Joe Biden and D4FRFP1 Donald Trump yesterday both traveled to the Texas border to highlight the crisis of thousands of people coming into this country every day, brazenly lowering America’s crime rate and shamelessly boosting its economy.
Biden proposed that the two men form an alliance to drive back the non-existent criminal invasion, before it completely overwhelms the nation’s capacity to handle lower crime rates and a stronger economy. Trump, meanwhile, blamed Biden for the influx of unauthorized law-abiders and illegal economy-boosters.
The two men were 300 miles apart, but Biden addressed Trump directly, urging him to drop his opposition to the Senate border bill that includes billions more in funding for border militarization and the immigrant-processing system. The bill is thought to have majority support in the House, but Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) believes in Jesus, not majority rule, fools, so he’s not letting the bill get a vote.
Trump has urged Johnson to block the bill, to deny Biden whatever political advantage it might yield. Trump apparently has forgotten that his epistemological superpowers enable him to (a) urge passage of the bill, (b) take credit for it when it happens, and then (c) resume lying about a border invasion in order to (d) blame Biden for screwing up implementation of the bill.
“Instead of playing politics with the issue,” Biden said to Trump despite Trump not being there, “join me, or I’ll join you in telling the Congress to pass this bill. You know and I know it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen,” Biden said to Trump despite the invasion of criminals and terrorists not being there.
True to form but not to fact, Trump used the Texas visit to falsely claim that incoming immigrants are terrorists and criminals. “This is like a war,” Trump said before exchanging friendly waves with people across the border.
NB: I’m making up none of this.
And, just like a war, Trump was then diagnosed with bone spurs so he could return to his comfortable albeit gauche home.
The dual visits were timed to coincide with a dramatic drop in the number of border encounters. As the AP documented with picture-helping, those numbers have plummeted recently, approaching peaks last seen during…the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles north of Trump and Biden focusing on the non-existent invasion of criminals and terrorists and job-thieves, a real invasion went largely ignored, likely because it lacked faces…
Largest Texas Wildfire Ever
Firefighters yesterday continued to battle a caravan of undocumented smoke and fire that’s already killed two people and virtually destroyed the town of Stinnett, TX.
The fire was aided by historic levels of dryness and heat, which in turn was caused by the state of Texas, ground zero for the American fossil fuel militants who, operating in largely autonomous cells, have carried out multiple successful attacks on mostly non-existent U.S. defenses.
Of course, wildfires are smart enough to not have faces or intentionality, so they don’t galvanize our defensive instincts the way poor brown people with faces do when they’re fleeing conditions that we made happen, so this week’s attack on Stinnett will produce literally zero U.S. counterattacks on ExxonMobil or anyone else.
Meanwhile, another faceless invasion that we also brought upon ourselves, did meet with some resistance yesterday…
Home Invaders Caught in the Act
The nigh-ubiquitous invasion of American homes by electronic spies claiming to protect us from extraordinarily uncommon home invaders ran into a roadblock yesterday, in the form of the brave men and women serving in the ranks of…Consumer Reports.
In a major counteroffensive yesterday, Consumer Reports opened fire with a report on home-surveillance cameras, which over the past decade have successfully infiltrated millions of American homes, poisoning residents with toxic doses of fear and paranoia. In a dispatch from the front lines of this invasion, Consumer Reports revealed that Eken Group home-surveillance cameras have a bug (or feature?!?) that could allow people to gain access to someone else’s recordings or even control the cameras themselves.
Turns out, Eken Group makes an app that users can, uh, use to patch into nearby surveillance cameras.
The Chinese company sells its cameras under brand names including EKEN and Tuck. Multiple companies, including Temu and Walmart, said they have blocked the cameras from their sites in response to the frontal assault by Consumer Reports.
Amazon, however, has promoted Eken cameras with its “Amazon’s Choice” badge, had no comment yesterday, and still offered Eken cameras for sale online when I checked this morning.
Hm. It’s almost as if Amazon has a financial motive not to feed surveillance-camera fear-mongeRING!
Actual Criminals Targeted Despite Lack of Media Outrage
In addition to the non-criminals pouring across the border and not invading our homes, a group of actual criminals has been ignored by both media and government for years. But now, credit to Pres. Joe Biden for getting semi-tough on this crime — law enforcement is finally targeting these career criminals.
I speak, of course, of millionaires.
The IRS this week is sending armed SWAT teams — I mean, stern non-compliance letters — to 25,000 people who earn make somehow acquire more than a million dollars a year but also haven’t filed tax returns since 2017 gee I wonder what happened in 2017 to make them stop filing tax returns?
An additional 100,000 people who earned made somehow acquired more than $400,000 but also didn’t pay taxes will also be getting hit with these letters.
The IRS is going after 125,000 high-income earners makers somehow-acquirers thanks to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included funding for a massive crackdown on crime committed by rich people who steal from the rest of us even more than the law says they’re allowed to steal from us.
Despite Republican fear-mongering about jack-booted IRS agents storming into your house mistaking you for a tax cheat — instead of jack-booted Border Patrol agents mistaking you for an invasion — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said audits will not increase for people earning less than $400,000 annually.
The IRS funding will, obvi, more than pay for itself, which is just part of the reason Republicans oppose it and have successfully whittled it down by about $20 billion from the original $80 billion.
Musk Sues Researchers for Tweet-Reading
Lawyers for free-speech defender Elon Musk argued in court yesterday that researchers read too many Tweets and then said things about the Tweets.
Musk, a free-speech defender, sued the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate after the center read too many Tweets and then used their freedom of speech to tell people what they read. Specifically, Musk claims that the center used third-party software to carry out wholesale reading of Twitter’s white supremacist garbage, contents so toxic that consuming even small amounts could prove lethal to most humans.
According to Musk, acting in his capacity as a free-speech defender, Twitter’s terms of service prohibit using software to see what’s said on Twitter thanks to free speech. Of course, this has nothing to do with what the center found…
Namely that there’s been a marked spike in hate speech on Twitter since Musk took over. And giving this info to advertisers has cost Musk money, which is more important than ethereal concepts such as free speech.
TCB
MUCH-DELAYED REPORTING No, I haven’t forgotten promising you original reporting. The drafts are pretty much done. I’ve gotta find thumbnail pictures for them — so you can share them effectively online! — but my current goal is to post them on Sunday, as kind of a preview to next week’s expected delivery by the House to the Senate of the articles of impeachment against Homeland [sic] Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Pray for me.
BUT DON’T JUST PRAY FOR ME New subscriptions have slowed lately, both free and paid, which maybe means your daily TFN hasn’t been up to snuff, let alone above snuff, while I’ve been focused on my upcoming reporting. Or maybe it means people value the original reporting more than the daily TFN and only sign up when I’ve got some splashy revelations to revelate. I just don’t know.
If you value either, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber and/or sharing whatever work of mine you think will be of value to others. And, of course, I hope you’ll let me know why you’re a loyal Newsfucker…
You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Forkheaven, and Smort. Okay, not those last two, but only because they don’t exist yet.
Go get ‘em, kids…!
D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.
I could help you look for thumbnails... just sayin'...