By Bob Gaydos

   I’ve watched the video countless times. Masked ICE agents rush up to a woman in a car in a residential area of Minneapolis and start screaming at her. The woman backs up to avoid the agent in front of her car. She then turns right to further avoid him and drive away. He steps clear of the car and fires his gun several times through the windshield. Someone yells, “What the f:;&k!?” The car crashes a short way from the shooting. The agent leaves the scene quickly and his buddies keep someone who says he’s a doctor from attending to the driver. End of story.

    The woman, who died at the hospital, was a 37-year-old mother of three, a poet, not a terrorist, an American citizen minding her own business.

    The next day, Kristi Noem, the fake-faced woman head of Homeland Security, blamed the woman for her death, said she tried to run over the agent. Said the agent was resting with his family after the ordeal. Trump said it was a miracle the guy was still walking around after the traumatic incident at the hands of a raging leftwing terrorist.

     They lied. We all saw the video. They lied. JD Vance took his turn. He lied. Blamed the victim whose children now have no mother. He lied. They lied. They lied. They lied. They lied. They lied. They lied. They lied. It’s what they do. They lied.

    Pam Bondi, the Attorney General who lies for Trump, says the FBI will investigate. It will not allow Minnesota police officials to be part of the investigation. Why? She is handing the job to Kash Patel, YouTube host turned FBI director. He has lied every day since he has held that title.

    They lie. They lie, they lie, they lie, they lie, they lie, they lie, they lie. They have always lied because enough people believed them. And so they will continue to lie. Trump lies, Noem lies, Bondi lies, Vance lies, Patel lies, they all lie.

    Her name was Renee Nicole Good. She died and your government killed her, then they lied.

    They lied, they lied, they lied, they lied, they lied, they lied, they lied. It’s all they ever do. We saw the video. They lied.

     At this point, it gives me no joy to say if you still believe them, you’re either a fool or you are them. There is simply no other choice. That’s no lie.

By Bob Gaydos

Donald Trump at Texas flood site.

Writing about how the nuts and bolts of federal government work, or are supposed to work, is often an exercise in trying to make the boring readable, if not necessarily interesting.

Not this time. This time, with nuts and bolts falling off the MAGA truck at seemingly every turn, I trust the reading will be not only interesting, but likely, infuriating.

Let’s start with the news that Dan Bongino, Deputy FBI director, may be on the verge of quitting in a major rift with Attorney General Pam Bondi over the suddenly disappearing  Epstein files.

Bongino is a conspiracy theorist who built a career as a podcaster in large part by demanding release of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein’s client list and accusing unnamed government officials of concealing it. This podcast popularity probably played a large part in him getting the job as assistant FBI director since he has no other real qualifications for the job.

Bongino expressed his anger with Bondi loudly in a meeting after a memo was leaked saying the FBI found no client list and also that Epstein did indeed commit suicide in his prison cell. That development came shortly after Bondi publicly said she had the files on her desk and she was waiting to review them.

To his credit here, Bongino is at least sticking to his guns and insisting there’s a list and demanding that the government release the files, whatever and whomever they include. Bondi, a Grade A Trump bootlicker, obviously feels otherwise.

There’s been speculation that FBI Director Kash Patel, whose qualifications for his job are also sketchy, is also unhappy with the way Bondi handled the situation. There have been rumors that both Patel and Bongino may step down. Nuts and bolts falling everywhere.

This is clearly not how government is supposed to operate. It would also be a unique development in a Trump administration. Two high ranking individuals resigning on a seeming matter of moral principle that could possibly implicate Trump.

The other major story, of course, is the flash flood in Texas that has claimed more than 100 lives so far, many of them young girls at a summer camp. Tragic. And even more wheels falling off the MAGA truck.

In addition to the well-reported fact that Trump ordered major cuts in the National Weather Service staff, thereby increasing the likelihood of weakened forecasting abilities, it turns out that National Security Director Kristi Noem, who oversees FEMA, required that requests for more than $100,000 in aid come to her desk, but ignored such requests from Texas for three days. Noem also unbelievably said that the federal government doesn’t handle state emergencies.

In addition, a downsized FEMA staff failed to answer thousands of phone calls from residents of Texas in the aftermath of the deadly flood. And David Richardson, FEMA director, who rarely even talks to staff, never showed up in Texas during or after the tragic flood. Instead, he was at a conference somewhere else where he didn’t even participate. Not a word from the FEMA director. Not even a presence. Nuts and bolts all over the ground.

For his part, Trump showed up in Texas more than a week late and rambled on in some kind of speech about rain. Nuts. He also muttered something about maybe not cutting so much FEMA funding after all. That convenient suggestion of change in policy probably didn’t soothe the pain of residents of Texas, especially parents who lost their young daughters to a raging river. Bolts.

And what the heck, while we’re at it, there’s that lingering nuts and bolts how-does-government-work question about who ordered the cancellation of weapons shipments to Ukraine. Trump, when asked about it at a press conference, said, “I don’t know.”

If that didn’t freeze the blood in every American citizen, I don’t know what will. The man with the power to authorize or reject military action, the man who ordered a bombing of Iran, didn’t know who ordered the cutoff of weapons to Ukraine.

He actually whispered to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “Do you know?”

Hegseth said, “No.”

Even scarier. No how-things-work here to even talk about, but I’ll take a stab. For what it’s worth, I have some friends in recovery who tell me they learned that they did some pretty scary things when they were in alcoholic blackouts and today still have no memory of it. Zilch.

Nuts and bolts, anyone?