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Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

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• New Quinnipiac poll: 61% think Trump lied about the shooting of Alex Pretti and 25% believe the Trump administration. Democrats (93%) and independents (65%) say Trump lied, while Republicans (60%) say he was honest. 80% think there should be an independent investigation. 78% have seen the video. Meanwhile, 65% say ICE has “gone too far,” according to the NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.

• In October 2024, a Rikers Island social worker came forward with a bombshell accusation: officers were routinely isolating severely mentally ill men in their cells for weeks and even months, a process known as “deadlocking.” The Department of Investigation (DOI), announced an inquiry. More than 450 days have since passed, and nothing has happened.

• Jeff Bezos axes a total of 2000 out of 2500 jobs in 2.5 years. Is The Washington Post entering a death spiral? Can it be replaced?

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The post Americans to Trump: You Lie! | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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•  National Security and Foreign Affairs Correspondent at Dropsitenews Murtaza Hussain joins Ted and John to discuss the Epstein Files and the disgraced financier’s links to foreign intelligence. Among the latest Epstein stories: Who sent Epstein cloth pieces from the Kaaba? How did he leverage the collectible art market?

• Trump threatens to nationalize elections by taking them away from Democratic states.

• A collision between a Greek Coast Guard patrol boat and a migrant boat leaves 15 people dead.

• Israeli border goons terrorize some of the first Palestinian women to return to Gaza via Rafah.

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The post Epstein Exposed (with Murtaza Hussain) | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

We’ve all seen those masked-up, militarized ICE goons charging through American city streets. Sure, we wonder about the future of democracy. But we also wonder: what are they carrying in all those many, many pockets?

The post The Things They Carry appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

You may be thinking that Trump and his Republicans have lost the immigration issue because voters are disgusted by ICE’s indiscriminate roundups, thuggish behavior and their killings of peaceful protesters who happen to be U.S. citizens. Indeed, the polls are clear. Voters have turned against ICE’s methods—but only their methods. Republicans are feeling heat.

Democrats hope they’ll benefit from anti-ICE backlash in the midterm elections. If that pans out, they’ll be winning a battle while losing the war.

Most people still want to deport illegal immigrants. When Democrats were in power, they promoted open borders—and Americans hate that. Both parties are losing the immigration game.

“Why?” my best friend asked me recently. “Why are people so angry at immigrants?”

I tried to explain. I’m white and male and able-bodied and cis and Ivy-educated and well-connected—big pluses—yet if I set out to find a 9-to-5 job, I told him, I probably wouldn’t be able to find one. All my life (I’m 62), finding work has been nearly impossible. Countless, demoralizing rejections, ridiculous hoops, stupid certifications, lengthy interviews, withdrawn job offers. Finding good work? I hardly ever did—and then it felt like winning a lottery. The job market always sucks.

I don’t know anyone—white, Black, rich, poor, male, female—who would dispute that.

Anything that contributes to America’s crappy job-finding landscape—as immigration, legal or illegal, does—is going to piss off workers.

When resources are abundant, human beings are generous. Charitable giving soars along with the stock market. When things are scarce, people are disinclined to share—like the rats in a cage who turn mean when food rations are reduced. In the U.S., jobs are an exceedingly rare resource.

It has always been tough to find a job in the U.S., especially a good one. And it keeps getting tougher. 9.7% of recent college graduates are unemployed. More than half of workers over 55 lose a job that results in a permanent loss of half their income. Many online listings are for “ghost jobs” that employers have no intention of filling. More than 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, meaning that they are jobless, reduced to working part-time or earning poverty-level wages. Another third are overqualified, working jobs that are beneath their education and experience.

60% of Americans say they’re toiling at a low-quality job or aren’t working at all.

They tell us to study STEM. But even going full nerd doesn’t guarantee employment. Between 6.1% and 7.8% of recent computer engineering and physics majors are unemployed; 45% of STEM majors are forced to take non-STEM jobs.

Given how hard it is in our piss-poor excuse for a capitalist economy for a hardworking American to find any job, much less a decent one, the last thing our misérables need is competition from new immigrants. People aren’t as angry at immigrants in particular as they are at immigration in general. Why is the U.S. importing workers from overseas when millions of Americans who were born here can’t find work?

Employers and pro-immigration politicians offer two standard rebuttals: skills mismatches and laziness. Americans, they say, don’t have the skills they need. And they don’t want to work backbreaking jobs like picking fruits and vegetables.

American companies have all but eliminated on-the-job training to the point that half of all workers, of all ages, say they don’t know what their boss expects from them. Expecting every new hire to hit the ground running is insane­—yet it’s become standard. Employers have no one but themselves to blame for the “skills gap.” Want skilled workers? Train them. Bring back the corporate educational institutions and apprenticeships that turned promising workers into skilled workers a century ago.

The same goes for companies who whine that they get no takers for hard jobs that offer low wages. Pay more. Americans that a ton of hard, dirty and dangerous jobs—oil rig worker, crime scene cleaner, sanitation, commercial diver/welder, crab fisherman, mortician—because they pay decently. A farmer who can’t find a fruit picker for $15 an hour may have to offer $20. No takers? Offer $25. Repeat as necessary. Go high enough and eventually you will find U.S. citizens happy to work for you.

Can’t afford to pay the market rate—i.e., a salary high enough to find applicants? Raise your prices or close your farm; you can’t afford to stay in business. Will higher wages increase inflation? Yes. So tweak monetary policy.

The H-1B visa program epitomizes how immigration policies have been cynically deployed in order to depress wages. To qualify for the program, tech and other companies certify to the federal government that they can’t find the skilled workers they need here in the United States, so they need to import them, typically from India. Yet, in countless well-documented instances, H-1B workers are hired by well-heeled corporations to displace American workers—who have the right skills­—whose final assignment is to train their replacements before they join the ranks of the unemployed. There was no skills gap, only corporate greed. Why wouldn’t victims be angry?

No sane American can begrudge the ambition and desperation of those who leave the land of their birth to seek their fortunes here. Most of us are descended from foreigners who did exactly that. In most of those cases, however, Americans’ ancestors arrived in great waves of immigration who were permitted entry into an economy suffering from labor shortages as the nation was expanding.

I don’t blame immigrants. They just want to survive, even thrive. Like native-born American workers, they’re victims of greedy capitalists who pit us against each other. It’s too bad not everyone can see that.

In the end, however, a government’s first duty is to protect and help its citizens. No one younger than 80 can remember a time when employers needed to turn abroad to fill their employment rosters. So I have a question for corporate America and the government officials it owns: Why, as long as the unemployment rate is higher than 0.0%, are we inviting people from other countries to fill American jobs?

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)

The post Both Parties Are Losing the Immigration Game appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  Bill and Hillary Clinton cave in to Republican demands that he testify before the House Oversight Committee about their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. A contempt vote still looms.

• Ignoring Trump’s threats, Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi and China’s Xi Jinping sign a dozen strategic partnership agreements following a Beijing confab that makes China that biggest trading partner for Latin America. Meanwhile, conservative populist Laura Fernández won Costa Rica’s presidency, promising to continue the aggressive reorienting of the Central American nation’s politics started by her political sponsor, outgoing President Rodrigo Chaves.

• Don Lemon said about a dozen federal agents came to his Los Angeles hotel to arrest him last week, even though his attorney had told authorities he would turn himself in. Is Lemon’s body a lethal force?

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•  After Democrats won a pair of special elections in surprise upsets, another bright spot for the party as they try to back the Senate: their candidates are raising a lot of money. Democrats have two weeks to squeeze concessions out of ICE—which has locked down its Texas gulag due to a measles outbreak—is it possible?

• Trump wants to build a 250-foot-tall memorial arch in DC to celebrate July 4th.

• Gulf Allies characterize Iran’s mid-range missiles as a deadly threat to the Middle East and US bases there. Turkey to host US-Iran negotiations.

• Google accused of violating its own ethics rules by handing over AI tech to Israel, which is using it to build its surveillance state. Meanwhile, Israel bans MSF from Gaza as Rafah crossing sort-of reopens.

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The post Senate for Sale | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

After ICE killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, right-wing defenders of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategies blamed the victim for coming to a demonstration bearing a weapon. This is despite the state’s clear right to carry a gun openly, the Second Amendment, and the GOP’s longstanding arguments in defense of its own who did the same thing in the past.

The post The Right To Bear Arms—Well, It Depends appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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•  Democrats covered up Biden’s physical and mental decline. As Trump gets caught sleeping through a cabinet meeting and rambling incoherently, some are asking: are Republicans covering up for their own octogenarian president?

• Will the world’s richest man let The Washington Post die? Fewer reporters are being sent to the Olympics and the Super Bowl. Foreign correspondents are holding off on trips to conflict zones. And editors are being encouraged to experiment with new forms of storytelling. Big layoffs are coming to the newsroom and the business sides of the paper, with sports, local and international taking most the pain. Video journalists, as well as politics and national security are expected to become more central.

• Democrats and the White House agreed to fund ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for two weeks while they negotiate restrictions on an immigration crackdown. Demands: banning ICE goons from masks and requiring them to wear body cameras and ID, an end to random immigration sweeps, judicial warrants for stop and searches and the same use-of-force standards as real cops. How much will Dems cave? Will Lindsey Graham hold things up? Did you hear about the “National Shutdown” today?

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The post Is Trump Bidening Out? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

It is impossible to imagine that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America ever envisioned that we would disintegrate to the point that we would fully embrace the militarization of American cities under civilian rule to the extent that we have built up ICE into a huge paramilitary terrorist force.Oh, well. It was a good run while it lasted.

The post The United States of America 1776-2026 appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  Trump intensified his threats against Iran suggesting he could soon attack “with speed and violence.” He and Europe want: an end to enrichment of uranium and disposal of current stockpiles, limits on the range and number of ballistic missiles, and an end to support for proxy groups including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Will Trump and/or Israel attack? How? When?

• Trump and Schumer are trying to avoid a partial government shutdown of Homeland Security this Saturday. Democrats want reforms to ICE—what would they look like? Also from Minnesota: Alex Pretti confronted ICE 11 days earlier, Trump vs. guns, Klobuchar running for governor.

• A Dutch court ruled that the Netherlands violated the human rights of residents of Bonaire by failing to protect them from the effects of climate change.

• After Trump demanded Minnesota voter records, FBI raids Fulton County, Georgia voter records. This has never happened before.

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The post Target: Tehran | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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•  Is Kristi Noem’s career as doomed as the puppy she shot? 3/4 of House Democrats would impeach her after CBP concluded Alex Pretti never “brandished” a gun, despite Noem’s claims. Democrats who voted to confirm her are joining right-wing Democrats like John Fetterman and some Republicans to call for her to step down in the aftermath of her repeated lies defending ICE killers in Minneapolis. Tim Kaine worries aloud that Stephen Miller would replace her.

• Ilhan Omar attacked by a man who sprayed her with an unknown liquid. And state legislators are proposing legislation to rein in ICE.

• Brunch Democrats schedule “No Kings 3” marches for March 28 because, when fascism is on the march, what’s the rush?

• Trump’s insults and military threats to Europe prompt his right-wing European ideological travelers to distance themselves from him for fear of vassalization.

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The post Dead As a Dog? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

When Allied forces, led by the United States, stormed onto Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, they were greeted by grateful Frenchmen as liberators. Given the face of militarization here today, it is hard to imagine that anyone will ever be happy to see us again.

The post We’ll Miss Them appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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•  Where will ICE kill its next American citizen? Greg Bovino replaced by Tom Homan in Minneapolis, Trump to pull “some” ICE stormtroopers out of Minnesota, gun rights groups seething over DHS rhetoric as Trump distances himself from his own staff. ICE isn’t done—where will they go next? Some are at the Winter Olympics.

• 1968 Redux: There’s no telling what an anxious United States will do next as a sense of disorder and chaos spreads across party lines.

• After the Nursing Home Lobby gave $5M to MAGA, Inc., Trump canceled a rule that would have required more staff.

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The post Where Will ICE Killers Go Next? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Many people assume that Germany instantly transitioned from representative democracy to totalitarianism following the ascension of Adolf Hitler to chancellor on January 30, 1933. Actually, the Weimar Republic had already been reeling from the global Great Depression, unpopular austerity measures and overreliance on emergency decrees that restricted civil rights. Throughout the 1930s until the invasion of Poland formally marked the start of World War II, the Nazi leadership had to tolerate—less so as time passed and they consolidated power—the German deep state: conservative economists, a military general staff dominated by Prussian aristocrats whom the former Austrian corporal couldn’t stand yet couldn’t do without, the civil service lifers who kept the bureaucracy functioning, and the legacy German judiciary and its overlapping state and national courts presided over by judges beholden mostly to laws passed before the fascist seizure of power.

The 1934 Enabling Act turned the Reichstag into a rubber-stamp parliamentary validation for anything the Führer State proposed. Even so, during the early years of his reign, Hitler’s regime focused on big-picture policies like economics while leaving intact thousands of pre-Third Reich civil and criminal laws concerning picayune administrative matters like tax rules and traffic regulations and street crime.

The tension between a German state based on law and order, and a Nazi regime hellbent on savaging its enemies manifested itself in the SA, the Stormtroopers known as Brown Shirts, and the SS. Theoretically, both organizations were incorporated into the formal state and military apparatus. But members swore personal loyalty to Hitler. These paramilitaries were assigned to do his dirty work—and assured that they would never be held to account under those pesky old pre-Nazi laws that remained on the books.

Surprisingly, Richard J. Evans writes in The Third Reich in Power, SA goons were sometimes arrested for assaulting Jews and leftists. And not just these enemies of the state. “Gangs of stormtroopers got drunk, caused disturbances late at night, beat up innocent passersby, and attacked the police if they tried to stop them.”

As a result there were, Evans writes, “more than 4,000 prosecutions of SA and SS men for crimes of various kinds that were still before the courts in May 1934…Many others had been quashed, and more offenses still had never been prosecuted in the first place, but this was still a considerable number.” Even among upright local cops in Berlin and other cities, the authorities sussed that the fix was in, the mooks were protected, and that they—and any judge with the courage to convict one and send him to prison—imperiled their careers and their persons unless they turned a blind eye. Prosecutions ended.

ICE under Trump is rapidly becoming his SA: overwhelming, vicious, gleefully assaulting anyone and everyone, in charge of their own private network of concentration camps, personally loyal to The Leader, above the law and thus able to operate with impunity. Local police are afraid of ICE.

State violence in which the government self-servingly ignored its own laws in order to randomly attack political opponents and scapegoats was a key building block of the Nazis’ consolidation of power.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the traumatizing impact of state violence on the population of an ordered society. You can’t trust anyone or anything. You pay taxes, but the government does nothing for you. You’re on your own. I gained insight into the psychology of state violence when a high-ranked officer of the New York City police department neglected to block his caller ID before he left a death threat on my voicemail and a truckload of right-wing firefighters smashed the door of my apartment building. Who could I report him to—the NYPD? Perhaps, counting on his de facto immunity as he committed a felony and a firing offense, he didn’t bother to cover himself up. The firemen went away after my journalist buddy appeared with his camera.

I’ve experienced state violence firsthand in the U.S., where cops have roughed me up and falsely accused me of offenses, big and small, I didn’t commit, and judges have sided with them despite their brazen lies. And I’m a white guy.

I’ve witnessed state violence during my travels to places like the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Visiting a friend in Kazakhstan in the late 1990s, my traveling companion was shocked to encounter a rotting corpse of a man who’d gotten run over by a car days earlier, still lying in the street. “Aren’t you going to call the police?” my friend asked our Kazakh host. Shooting me a knowing glance and dark grin, the Kazakh laughed: “Your friend, this is his first time here, yes?” In a country with state violence, you don’t call the cops to go after criminals. Cops are the criminals.

State violence is worse than anarchy. Where there is no state, you can be robbed or raped or killed and nothing will happen to your robber or rapist or killer. It’s deeply unsettling. On the other hand, you also enjoy perfect immunity for self-defense or revenge. If you get the better of your assailant or get even with him, nothing will happen to you either. You’re on your own but, with luck and smarts and strength and charm, you may thrive. It’s Darwin’s world; we live in it until someone eats us up.

I’ve seen anarchy in places like Afghanistan, when there were no police or courts or other authorities. I often feared for my life. On a few occasions, I caused others to fear for theirs. Over time, I connected enough friends and allies to create, if not civilization, a working modus operandi. Now, under the Taliban, there is law and order. It’s the main thing that government is able to provide, but don’t shortchange it—few things are more valuable than law and order when they’re absent.

A lawless state is the worst of both worlds. You have neither the freedom to kill or be killed, nor freedom from a hypocritical state that accuses you of everything and shows no mercy while refusing to even pretend to hold itself to the same rules.

A lawless state declares that the right to carry a firearm is a sacred constitutional right unless it doesn’t care for your apparent political affiliation, in which case it can kill you. It investigates its foes with punitive legal fishing expeditions while refusing to investigate when its agents gun down peaceful unarmed citizens. It fights for the free speech rights of its allies overseas as it arrests its enemies for barely saying a word out of turn.

A government fully committed to state violence, as Nazi Germany’s government would wink at the murderers in its employ years before the first pellet of Zyklon B was used to murder a person, and as the U.S. is doing now—not even bothering to lie decently about the Venezuelan fishermen and peaceful Minnesotans it slaughters to amuse itself—makes one long for the far better non-system system of anarchy.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)

The post “Mad Max” Anarchy Is Safer Than Trump’s Terror State appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Today we discuss:

•  Minneapolis Crisis: Americans are turning against Trump and his ICE surge against Minneapolis, where agents executed an unarmed nurse, U.S. citizen Alex Pretti—with no signs of a real investigation in sight over the president’s personal Kent State. Democrats are threatening to close the government later this week over Homeland Security funding. Republican politicians are starting to read the room but most continue to defend ICE. ICE offers to leave Minneapolis in exchange for voter records—what’s that about?

• Military top brass purged in China.

• Rafah border crossing reopened: Will Israel make it a one-way trip?

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The post Who Will ICE Kill Next? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

President Trump claims to be an economic nationalist. But the only real jobs program he has created has been ICE and the associated gulags he is constructing for undocumented migrants to be brutalized and deported. How does he square “America First” with outsourcing the jobs of concentration camp guards to foreign countries?

The post Keep American Concentration Camp Guard Jobs in America! appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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•  Jared Kushner presented a glittering vision of postwar Gaza centered around the construction of entirely new cities where rubble and Palestinian bodies currently lay rotting. Who will be in charge? Who will profit?

• Minneapolis braces for today’s city-wide strike against ICE, which will close hundreds of businesses.

• Trump looks Left on economic populism.

• Kristi Noem’s Homeland Security tweeted a racist altered photo of a women arrested for opposing an ICE preacher.

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The post Club Med Gaza | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

ICE—which Trump has transformed into one of the world’s largest militarized forces—is already the nation’s largest domestic police force. How realistic is it to think this employment project for undereducated goons won’t turn against American citizens after completing the mass deportation of illegal immigrants?

The post ICE Mission Accomplished appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 2 pm Eastern, and then streaming whenever you wanna hear/watch it:

The DMZ America Podcast dives headfirst into one of the most explosive issues rocking the nation right now: the transformation of ICE from a border security agency into a violent, unaccountable domestic force under the current Trump administration. ICE touts itself as DHS’s top law enforcement arm, fighting transnational threats while protecting communities, legal immigration, trade, travel, and financial systems. But in practice, the administration ramps up agent numbers aggressively, deploys recruitment tactics that echo white nationalist themes—like using lyrics from “We’ll Have Our Home Again” in ads—and slashes training about de-escalation and rules of engagement.

A bombshell 233-page court order from Judge Sara L. Ellis in Chicago exposes widespread duplicity, lies, and abuse of power by ICE and DHS officials. She slams agents for using force that “shocks the conscience”—pepper-balling clergy, tear-gassing kids and pregnant women, tackling protesters without justification—finding no legitimate government interest in many actions.

Top officials push narratives of “absolute immunity,” with Stephen Miller and JD Vance assuring agents they’re untouchable, even as former ICE leaders like Deborah Fleischaker call it dangerous overreach that emboldens aggression and erodes public safety. As ICE becomes the biggest military force on Earth, against which Americans will they turn when they run out of illegals to deport?

You and me.

Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) break it down—no holds barred, cutting through the spin with sharp analysis and dueling perspectives that make you think hard about power, accountability, and where this all leads.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 226: “ICE: Trump’s Stormtroopers” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  Cuban detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos was asphyxiated and throttled to death by ICE guards in El Paso, the county medical examiner rules. Federal officials called his death a suicide. 5-year-old Pre-K Liam Ramos used as bait for his dad by ICE. An ICE document told officers and agents they can forcibly enter deportees without warrants. 32% of Americans tell NYT/Siena Poll Trump made the county better; 49% say it’s worse.

• Supreme Court likely to rule that Trump can’t fire Fed board members like Lisa Cook at will, in a landmark separation of powers ruling.

• What is in the vague “framework” settling the Greenland Crisis?

• Clintons face bipartisan Contempt of Congress over Epstein testimony.

The post ICE Cold Liars | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.