What Happened Today - 4 March 2026
What Happened Today – 4 Mar 2026
Puppy Killer (aka Noem)
Trump was once again…off the rails
Loyalty to Trump is Loyalty to God
TX and NC Primaries
Iran and the Lack of Weapons…
Ok…war in also…Ecuador
What is yours….is actually Trump’s…in his mind
Meeting to Discuss Trump’s “War Power”
Noem is BACK in the hotseat today…
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Puppy Killer (aka Noem)
Noem was questioned yesterday in the Senate, and it was exactly as ugly as you’d expect from the person running Trump’s deportation machine. Senators on Judiciary — Democrats and even a couple of Republicans — hit her on everything: the DHS shutdown, the ICE shootings, the Minneapolis occupation, family separations, and whether she’s turned ICE and CBP into Trump’s personal domestic army instead of law enforcement.
They spent a lot of time on the killings and shootings, especially Minneapolis and Chicago. You had Marimar Martinez literally sitting behind her while Noem claimed she “wasn’t familiar with the details” of Martinez being shot by an immigration agent in Chicago and couldn’t even say if the agent was still on the job, which is insane given that this is her department and this woman has become a national symbol of ICE brutality. Senators grilled her on the deaths of Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — both U.S. citizens killed by federal immigration agents — and asked why she immediately labeled them “domestic terrorists” before any investigation, even after her own oversight office’s preliminary report undercut parts of that story. She ducked, deflected, and basically pretended she was just “following the facts,” even though the record shows she ran to the cameras with that terrorism label and only tried to walk it back once the blowback hit.
The lies and half-truths were everywhere. She flat-out denied blaming her “domestic terrorist” language on Stephen Miller, even though a senator read her the quote from an on-the-record article where she did exactly that. She brushed off a whistleblower who said ICE training has been gutted, claiming agents are properly trained through some compressed six-day, 12‑hour schedule plus on-the-job time, as if rushing people through a firehose makes it fine. She stuck to this line that DHS is just “enforcing the law” while ignoring the mountain of evidence that under her watch ICE has been deporting record numbers of little kids, using so-called “self-deport” payments to teenagers to get them to waive their rights, and literally targeting parents and sponsors of unaccompanied kids as bait for arrests. Every time someone tried to pin her down on whether those tactics are acceptable, she flipped it into “Do you want me to ignore the law?” or started ranting about Democrats “holding DHS hostage” by not funding her department, like the reason she can’t stop abusing children is Congress won’t give her a bigger check.
On the broader ICE horror show, senators tried to push her on whether anything will actually change — the raids tearing apart mixed-status families, the arrests of U.S. citizens, the agents monitoring protests and even sniffing around voting spaces in Minnesota. She admitted they still have around 650 DHS agents on the ground in Minnesota “focusing on fraud” but didn’t take any responsibility for the atmosphere of fear they created with mass operations, beatings of protesters, and deadly force. When pressed about reports of ICE agents monitoring voting and whether she’d send them to polling sites if Trump or Miller asked, she dodged by firing back, “Are you planning to send illegal immigrants to vote?” — pure MAGA deflection instead of an answer about basic civil rights. Multiple senators openly called for her resignation during the hearing, pointing to the shootings, the child deportation numbers, and the way DHS has blown off court orders and oversight letters, but she just sat there repeating her script about “defending the homeland” and “supporting the men and women of DHS.”
At yesterday’s hearing, GOP Sen. Thom Tillis basically torched her over that disgusting story from her book where she bragged about shooting her 14‑month‑old puppy, Cricket, and then killing a goat the same day. He told her straight up that as someone who trains dogs, he knows a 14‑month‑old is basically a teenager, and that if she’d actually bothered to train the dog instead of tossing it into a pheasant hunt and then losing her mind when it acted like a puppy, she wouldn’t have been in that situation. He slammed her for having the audacity to package that as some kind of “leadership lesson” about tough choices, and then he connected the dots exactly the way you’d expect: those snap, cruel choices with the dog and the goat are the same kind of bad judgment she’s showing now with DHS, especially in places like Minneapolis where her agents killed citizens and she rushed to label them terrorists.
After the hearing, he kept going with reporters, saying she made “impulsive decisions” with that dog and goat and that’s not just a character quirk when you’re running an agency that literally holds people’s lives in its hands. So yes, even Republicans are now using her own dog‑murder story as shorthand for how unfit she is to be in charge of ICE and the rest of DHS — and for once, they’re not wrong.
As for whether anything is going to change with ICE after this, the short answer is: not because she suddenly grew a conscience. There’s clearly bipartisan anger — Republicans are mad she cheapened “domestic terrorism” to smear dead citizens, Democrats are furious at the child deportations and brutality — but structurally, she’s still in the job, Trump still backs her, and the machinery keeps grinding unless Congress forces a break. You’ve got senators demanding ICE halt actions against kids, pointing to record deportations of children under 11 and insane things like $2,500 “resettlement” payments to pressure teenagers to self-deport, and writing letters documenting thousands of family separations and raids that ignore court protections — but Noem didn’t concede a single core policy yesterday. So what we’re left with is a DHS chief who will lie, spin, and hide behind “the law” while overseeing an ICE system that is openly cruel, documented as abusive, and now lethal on U.S. soil — and a Congress that’s clearly pissed off, but still hasn’t pulled the trigger on the one thing that would actually change this: cutting off her authority or sending her packing.
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Trump was once again…off the rails
Yesterday was an absolute train wreck for Trump — he went full mask-off and just said the quiet parts out loud all day long.
On Iran, he kept bragging on TV that we’re “knocking the crap” out of Iran and then casually warned that the “big wave” of strikes hasn’t even started yet, like he’s teasing a season finale instead of talking about a war where Americans are already dead and more are likely to die. He repeated that line that we “haven’t even started hitting them hard” and that the “big one is coming soon,” openly signaling more escalation while pretending this is all still totally under control. He also shrugged off basic international law by saying, “We don’t need to be concerned about treaties,” which is exactly what it sounds like: the president of the United States publicly telling the world that rules and agreements don’t apply to him when he wants to bomb someone.
He also managed to step on his own “no new wars” promise in the most embarrassing way. Clips were all over the place of him on the campaign trail saying he’d never start another war, and now even parts of his own MAGA base are pissed that he’s dragged us into a huge conflict with Iran while still trying to call it “America First.” You’ve got right-wing people who loved him for staying out of new wars now asking why their kids might be sent to die in a war he can’t explain in one straight sentence, and his answer is basically: trust me, we’ll hit them harder later. The whole thing just exposed how hollow that promise always was — “no wars” until he decided a big flashy one served him politically.
On top of that, he kept spewing nonsense about how great everything is at home while ICE and DHS are in full meltdown. He’s still bragging that the border is “fixed” and immigration is under control, ignoring the fact that his policies have given us kids being deported, citizens getting shot by immigration agents, and massive operations that even conservative judges are saying trample the law. In the same breath that he congratulates himself for “protecting Americans,” he’s glossing right over the Americans killed by his own enforcement people and the communities terrorized by raids and surveillance. So yeah, yesterday was peak Trump: openly promising more war, blowing off treaties, contradicting his own “no new wars” pledge, and pretending that the chaos and cruelty he’s unleashed at home and abroad somehow proves he’s the strong, responsible one in the room.
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Loyalty to Trump is Loyalty to God
Yesterday’s reporting about more than a hundred service members hearing their own commanders say Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” and that this war is “all part of God’s divine plan.” THIS is exactly the nightmare mix of politics, religion, and war that everyone’s been warning about. You’ve got troops across multiple bases describing almost the same script: senior officers and chaplains framing this Iran war as some kind of biblical showdown, calling Trump God’s chosen instrument to prevent the end times, and implying that questioning the mission is basically doubting God’s plan. That’s not just weird or uncomfortable, that’s dangerous — it turns a brutal, real-world war with real people dying into a holy crusade in the minds of the people ordered to fight it.
The part that really sticks in my throat is that these are chain-of-command conversations, not some random dude in the barracks sounding off. When leaders start preaching that Jesus picked Trump to stop Armageddon, it sends a clear message: loyalty to Trump and loyalty to God are the same thing, and anyone who has doubts about this war is spiritually suspect. It flips the whole idea of civilian control and an apolitical military on its head. Instead of a secular republic sending its military into harm’s way under the Constitution, you’ve got officers telling young, scared service members that they’re soldiers in a literal end-times struggle and the president is divinely backed.
Layer that on top of the fact that Trump himself is treating this war like a TV event — teasing “big waves” of strikes, talking about “the big one” still to come — and now you see how the cult energy bleeds straight into the ranks. If you’re sitting on a base that’s already been rocketed, watching friends get wounded or worse, and then your commander stands up and says Jesus anointed Trump to stop Armageddon, what space is left for you to say, “This mission doesn’t make sense,” or “This war is wrong”? It’s psychological pressure dressed up as faith. And once you’ve wrapped a war in prophecy, it becomes that much harder for anyone in power to admit it’s a mistake, scale it back, or end it — because who wants to be the one who “betrayed God’s plan”?
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Budget Update
Yesterday’s fight over the budget was really about ICE and power, not some honest good-faith attempt to “protect Americans” like Republicans are pretending. Jeffries basically told them: you don’t get a blank check for DHS while ICE is out here killing citizens and brutalizing families.
Republicans tried to use the Iran war as leverage, rolling out a DHS funding bill and yelling that, with the terror threat higher, Democrats had to cave and fully fund DHS right now. Jeffries shut that down. He said Trump started an unauthorized, potentially endless war and is already dumping billions into bombing Iran instead of helping people with grocery prices and basic costs — and now the same crew wants to use that war as an excuse to keep ICE “unleashed” at home with no new rules. Democrats have been clear for weeks: no more short-term patches, no more “clean” DHS money unless the bill puts real limits on ICE and CBP — warrants, use-of-force rules, clear bans on masked-up anonymous agents, independent investigations when people get killed, and actual standards in detention.
Right now, big chunks of DHS are in shutdown mode because that standoff hasn’t been resolved, and Republicans are trying to spin that as Democrats being soft on security. In reality, Democrats are saying: we’re not going to keep writing checks for an agency that shot U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, ignored court orders, and is openly out of control, just because Trump picked a fight with Iran and wants to wrap ICE in the flag. Republicans are planning another vote on their bill, but Jeffries has basically drawn a line: unless there are “bold, meaningful and transformational” changes to ICE baked into the funding, they’re not signing off — war or no war.
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TX and NC Primaries
Yesterday, while everyone was locked on Iran, the political undercurrent here at home got even weirder and darker. You’ve got these big Senate primaries in Texas and North Carolina that are basically proxy wars for the soul of both parties: establishment Republicans panicking because hardcore MAGA challengers are either leading or way too close for comfort, and Democrats scrambling to figure out if they have anyone strong enough — and unapologetic enough — to run in a country that Trump is actively shoving toward full authoritarian mode. Inside the GOP, it’s not “normal conservative vs. Trump” anymore, it’s “loud MAGA vs. slightly more polite MAGA,” and donors are freaking out because they know once the base fully locks in around the loud ones, they’re stuck with candidates who want to burn the rulebook, not tweak it. On the Democratic side, you can feel the anxiety: do they run safe, boring “norms” people while Trump is staging an autocratic speed-run, or do they finally put up candidates who say flat out what Chris Murphy and a few others are already saying — that we are in the middle of a totalitarian takeover, and this Iran war is just another front in that project, not some one-off foreign policy adventure. The war, the primaries, the rhetoric — it’s all connected; it’s the same movement testing how far it can go while everyone else is exhausted, distracted, or too cautious to say out loud what’s actually happening.
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Iran and the Lack of Weapons
Yesterday really drove home how shaky our ammo situation actually is, no matter how many times Trump and his people swear we’re “fine” and “have plenty.” They keep using big-man talk to paper over basic math, and the math is ugly. We are burning through high-end interceptors and missiles faster than the factories can replace them, while Iran can churn out cheap drones and missiles on assembly-line speed.
On our side, look at interceptors. For systems like THAAD and Patriot, doctrine is usually two or three interceptors fired at every incoming missile or drone to be sure it gets killed. Each THAAD shot is in the ballpark of 15 million dollars a pop, and we already fired something like 150 of them just defending Israel in an earlier Iran fight, which chewed through a huge slice of that inventory in under two weeks. Patriot PAC‑3 MSE output has been ramped up to around 600‑plus missiles a year globally, which works out to about 50 a month, and that has to cover every Patriot user on the planet, not just us lighting off interceptors in the Gulf. Even if we lean on stockpiles, experts are saying interceptor magazines in the region can start getting dangerously low in days if Iran keeps up this tempo, not months, and the Pentagon’s own people are warning privately that we’re using them faster than the industrial base can replace them.
Now flip it and look at Iran’s side of the ledger. Their drones and many of their missiles are cheap, simple, and built to be pumped out in huge volumes. Open-source analysis of the Shahed production line (the same basic family of drones they’ve used in Ukraine and around the region) shows facilities designed to spit out hundreds of drones a month — and that’s with just one plant running one main shift. With extra shifts, those numbers jump even higher. We’re talking thousands of drones a year, and that’s before you even factor in Iran’s ballistic missile inventory and whatever production they’ve got going there. So while it takes us months and millions to add a few dozen more interceptors, they can spin up wave after wave of relatively cheap drones and rockets every month. This is exactly the nightmare: they just need a few leakers to get through each time, and our air defenses get thinner with every salvo.
So when Trump gets on TV and waves away concerns, saying we’re in great shape and the factories can “just run more shifts,” he’s leaving out the part where it still takes months to build these things and years to fully expand capacity, and that every interceptor we spend on this war is one we don’t have for Europe, Asia, or even defending the homeland. That’s why people inside the Pentagon and on the Hill are quietly freaking out: you can’t brute-force your way through a long war of attrition when your stuff costs millions per shot and takes months to replace, and the other guy can crank out cheap attack drones like a nasty little assembly line from hell. In other words, yeah — if this drags on at this pace, we are kind of fucked, no matter how loudly they insist everything is under control.
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War in also…Ecuador…
Yes, we are now involved in a shooting “operation” in Ecuador too, and it’s exactly the kind of mission-creep bullshit you’d expect from this crew.
Here’s what actually happened: the Pentagon and U.S. Southern Command quietly announced that U.S. and Ecuadorian forces have launched joint operations inside Ecuador against what they’re calling “designated terrorist organizations” — which in practice means drug cartels and gangs that we ourselves slapped with the “terrorist” label last year. American Special Forces are on the ground “advising and assisting” Ecuadorian commandos: helping plan raids, providing intelligence, flying helicopters, and running logistics, while Ecuadorian troops kick in doors and hit targets. They’re insisting our people aren’t the ones doing the shooting, but this is real military action inside another country, under a counterterrorism/narco‑terrorism frame, launched without anything close to a national debate or a fresh vote from Congress.
How did we get here? Ecuador’s president, Noboa, has been turning his own country into a militarized “war on gangs” zone after cartel violence exploded and homicides went through the roof. He cozied up hard to Trump — came to the second inauguration, hugged Rubio and Noem on security, tried to get U.S. bases in Ecuador (voters shot that down in a referendum), and has been begging for deeper military help. In September, Rubio went down there and literally said the U.S. would “blow up” criminal groups if needed, and the State Department designated two big gangs, Los Lobos and Los Choneros, as foreign terrorist organizations. That “terrorist” label is the magic key: once you call them terrorists, Trump’s people treat it like they have a blank check to roll out Special Forces, drones, strikes on boats, whatever — all under the same war-on-terror legal mush they’re using to justify boat strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
So now, at the same time we are in an open war with Iran, we’ve quietly expanded this “Operation Southern Spear” / narco‑terrorism campaign into a full joint operation in Ecuador — advising raids, targeting “narco‑terrorists,” and bragging on social media about “decisive action” alongside a president who literally just lost a referendum on letting us have bases there. That’s how we ended up in two conflicts at once: Trump and his people have turned “terrorist” into a magic word that lets them move U.S. military power into more and more places with as little oversight as possible. One war in Iran they won’t call a war, one expanding “operation” in Ecuador they won’t call a war, both justified with the same “no kings, but also no limits” bullshit — and none of it something the American people actually got to say yes or no to.
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What is yours….is actually Trump’s…in his mind
Yesterday Trump basically said out loud that he doesn’t care what Spain says about its own territory — if he wants their bases for his Iran war, he’ll use them anyway — which is completely unhinged even by his standards. In the same breath he threatened to “cut off all trade with Spain” because they refused to let us use the Rota and Morón bases for strikes on Iran, then bragged that “we could use their base if we want, we could just fly in and use it, nobody’s going to tell us not to use it.” Spain’s government has been crystal clear: those are joint-use facilities under Spanish sovereignty, and they will not allow them to be used for attacks on Iran that violate international law or go beyond the treaty and UN Charter framework they agreed to.
Why is this insanity? Start with the basics: even a superpower doesn’t get to just ignore another democracy’s government and use its bases without permission. That’s not “being tough,” that’s openly fantasizing about violating another country’s sovereignty, shredding the defense agreement you signed, and spitting on the whole idea of international law — which Trump has literally said he doesn’t think we need. If he ever actually tried to do what he’s boasting about, it would mean U.S. forces trespassing on an ally’s territory, triggering a full-blown diplomatic crisis with the EU and NATO, and giving every enemy on earth proof that the U.S. thinks “might makes right” applies even to its friends.
On top of that, threatening to “halt all trade” with Spain because they won’t be his launchpad is economic lunacy layered on top of strategic lunacy. Spain is part of the EU single market; you don’t just flip a switch and cut them off without blowing up huge chunks of transatlantic trade law and probably tanking markets in the middle of a war he swears he wants to keep “limited.” Spanish leaders are spelling out the obvious: they want a world where predictable rules and the UN Charter matter, not one where Trump decides he can embargo an ally and maybe use their bases anyway because he’s mad about defense spending and Iran. The fact that the president of the United States is even talking this way — daring an ally, threatening economic warfare, and casually suggesting we don’t need their consent to use their bases — is exactly how you alienate friends, trash the rule of law, and turn one reckless war into a full-on breakdown of the alliances that are supposed to keep us from sliding into something even worse.
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Meeting to Discuss Trump’s “War Power”
Yesterday, Congress finally started to grapple with the monster they helped create: how much power Trump actually has to drag us into a full-on war without anyone voting on it. Lawmakers in both the House and Senate are meeting today to debate and vote on war powers resolutions aimed at forcing Trump to come to Congress for authorization if he wants to keep bombing Iran, and in some versions, to pull U.S. forces out of hostilities against Iran within 30 days unless there’s a real authorization or formal declaration of war.
They’re doing this backwards — the war is already underway, Americans are already dead, bases are under fire — but this is their attempt to claw back the constitutional power they’ve let presidents chip away at for decades. You’ve got people like Tim Kaine, Ro Khanna, and Chris Murphy saying out loud that Trump does not get to unilaterally launch and sustain a major war based on shifting justifications and a vague letter about “terrorism” and missiles, especially when he himself admits he doesn’t know how long this will last. On the other side, Republicans aligned with Trump — Mike Johnson in the House, Senate hawks on the GOP side — are warning that tying his hands in the middle of a shooting war would be “frightening” and insisting the commander-in-chief needs maximum flexibility, which is code for: let him keep doing whatever he wants.
The ugly truth is that even if these war powers resolutions pass one or both chambers, Trump will almost certainly veto them, and there probably aren’t two‑thirds majorities in either chamber to override him. That’s why some experts are calling this a tipping point: Congress is voting on whether to approve or restrain a war that’s already in motion, and the outcome may prove that their supposed power to declare war is more symbolic than real when a determined president decides to blow past them. So today’s debate isn’t just about Iran; it’s about whether we still live in a system where Congress has real say over war and peace, or whether we’ve quietly slid into a world where one man can ignite multiple conflicts and everyone else is left holding “strongly worded resolutions” after the bombs have already fallen.
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Noem is BACK in the hotseat today…
So far, today’s Noem hearing is going about how you’d expect: she’s still dodging, still blaming everyone else, and the frustration on the Hill is boiling over. House Democrats are pressing her hard on Minneapolis, the ICE shootings, and the broader crackdown — asking why she labeled Renee Good and Alex Pretti “domestic terrorists,” why DHS dragged its feet on investigations, and why agents who killed U.S. citizens are still on the job — and she’s giving the same non-apology word salad she gave the Senate: offering “condolences” but refusing to actually say she was wrong. Republicans are split; some are backing her to the hilt, but you’ve still got people like Thom Tillis hanging over the whole thing after yesterday’s “this has been a disaster under your leadership” performance and his threat to jam up Trump’s nominations until DHS stops stonewalling.
The other big thread is the DHS shutdown. Members are hitting her with the fact that huge parts of her department are unfunded and people are missing paychecks, while the immigration crackdown somehow keeps plenty of money flowing thanks to that giant “One Big Beautiful Bill” from last year. Noem’s line is that Democrats are “holding DHS hostage” and hurting the rank and file, but Democrats are making it crystal clear on the record that this is about ICE being out of control — that they’re using the funding fight to try to force real limits and accountability, not just hand her another blank check while she runs a paramilitary operation in Minneapolis and beyond.
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However with all this crazy…It will get better. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but this doesn’t last forever. We see what’s happening. We know the truth. And one day, the people driving this cruelty will face real consequences — prison, disgrace, their names dragged through history as a warning, not a model. Hitler and Trump will sit side by side in that hall of “most evil and awful,” and no amount of spin will wash that off.
I hold onto the certainty that, eventually, it will be good again. Our job is to push as hard and as smart as we can to get there faster — to do our part, in whatever ways we can, to bend this back toward something decent. So that one day, kids will inherit the version of America I grew up in: flawed, yes, but not proudly monstrous.
Speak Truth! Keep speaking TRUTH!
Don’t Give up the Ship!
Go Cause Good Trouble, with Your Elbows Up!
These are facts that I researched and verified – AI helped put together some sentence structure, but the words and tone are mine. These are my views based upon facts, research and thoughtful consideration using logic. I own the copyright to any images used. I’m comfortable to stand alone to uphold truth. Feel free to check me, but do not attack me. I am only causing good trouble.