Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I have no cheery thoughts for you today. And I am feeling empty – which is not an unusual response to intense, prolonged tragedy. I’d love for it to be angry or engaged, maybe some sadness. But numb it is. Here we are.
That does not mean I’m going to sit on the couch, eating Blue Bell, watching old movies and then diving into more dark social media posts (okay I mean that’s not all I’m going to do) – there are some actual action steps we can take.
*Noting that there are many things that those two worthies did that we might not want to replicate…;-)
I have nothing unique to add to an interpretation of today’s news. I am as angry, frustrated, and mortally sad as any of us here, John, Betty, Watergirl, all of us.
But maybe this is worth sharing:
On learning of the latest ICE murder, I did something I haven’t for a very long time: I sought out the Declaration of Independence and read its first section with an ear to its present day resonances.
It’s striking, and useful. (Adjusting for the assumptions of the day. All people, that is, not merely all men…)
…
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness….To prove this [the existence of tyranny], let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
The catalogue indictments Jefferson and his co-authors came up with was extensive, and seemingly specific to the abuses of (episodically) mad King George. But reading through that tally again just now I am struck by how readily many of them translate to our current moment. Some examples:
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
…
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
…
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
…
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: [emphasis added, obviously]
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
…
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
…
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
…
To be sure, there are a few offenses attributed to George R. that reflect more poorly on the signatories of the Declaration than on that distant king. And there are others that have analogues in Trump’s behavior now but do not map onto current offenses as clearly as those above.
But damn! The armed assault on our people; the impunity claimed and so far maintained for the paramilitary murders and assaults we daily witness; the capricious viciousness around immigration; the idiotic and arbitrary tariffs…all of Trump’s greatest hits are there.
Which leads, of course, to the next, obvious thought: if the end sought in the Declaration of Independence made sense in that moment, how should we respond to our like grievances now, in our current, quite different circumstances?
I don’t have a good answer. But ISTM that’s the question right now.
Open thread.
NB: this is a lightly edited cross post of a rant I put up on Substack’s “notes” app just now.
Image: Léon Cogniet, Massacre of the Innocents, 1824
What Would Thomas Jefferson and John Adams Do?*Post + Comments (79)
Inside the Sandwich Guy’s Jury Deliberations
www.yahoo.com/news/article…— tommyboy0690.bsky.social (@tommyboy0690.bsky.social) November 12, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Mostly posting this because I’d seen rumors about Dunn’s motivation, but no actual reporting (per the paragraph I’ve highlighted in the extract below.) Ashley Parker, for the Atlantic [gift link]:
The jurors in the case of The United States of America v. The Sandwich Guy (as Sean Charles Dunn is better known) sized one another up before the final group had even been selected, asking, “Did you attend the ‘No Kings’ march?”
“It’s like, You’re damn right I went,” one juror told me, referring to the anti-Trump protests throughout the country last month, including in Washington, D.C. (The juror, who spoke with me several days after she and 11 of her peers found Dunn not guilty of assault, did so anonymously because, as she explained, Donald Trump’s administration is “very vengeful,” and she fears retribution.)
The facts of the incident are ostensibly simple: In the early days of Trump’s militarization of the nation’s capital, Dunn—a 37-year-old Air Force veteran and, at the time, Justice Department employee—screamed at federal officers stationed in a popular nightlife corridor, repeatedly calling them fascists, and then hurled a Subway footlong at a Customs and Border Protection agent, hitting him squarely in the chest. “I did it. I threw a sandwich,” Dunn confessed to law enforcement upon being apprehended—a sort of modern Williams Carlos Williams (“I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox …”) for the more carnivorous, angrier set. Although it was widely reported at the time that the sandwich was salami, Dunn later said it was turkey…
Like nearly everything involving Trump, the episode became polarizing, absurdist, stripped of nuance—a Rorschach test for both one’s politics and one’s life experience. (As someone who in my early 30s lived just off the nightlife corridor near 14th and U Streets where the hoagie histrionics occurred, I initially assumed: Drunk dude, egged on by drunk people, does drunk thing.)
And so, in an escapade to which everyone brought a deeply personal perspective—the government that dubbed Dunn an “example of the Deep State”; the D.C. residents who turned him into a Resistance folk hero memorialized in street art and Halloween costumes; the sandwich thrower himself, whose lawyers portrayed him as unfairly targeted by the Trump administration—the 12 jurors found themselves simply trying to do their jobs, as fairly and impartially as possible.
The juror I spoke with told me that the jury—three men and nine women (roughly an equal mix of Black and white)—included an architect, a professor, an analyst, and some retirees whom she described as probably “100 percent anti-Trump” and protective of their city. She went into the trial thinking it was “bullshit,” she told me, “but I did enter it trying to be objective.”…
The group was careful to avoid politics, she said, and instead focused on several key questions: Had the sandwich actually “exploded all over” CBP agent Gregory Lairmore, as he’d testified? (Specifically, they analyzed—and at times mocked—Lairmore’s claim that “I had mustard and condiments on my uniform, and an onion hanging from my radio antenna that night.”) What was Dunn’s intent in flinging the grinder? And what actually constitutes “bodily harm”?
On the first question, several jury members struggled to stifle laughter as Lairmore expanded on the hoagie’s alleged explosive properties. “It was like, Oh, you poor baby,” the juror told me. But the group observed that photos of the sandwich at the scene showed it fully intact, still in its Subway wrapper. “So how did it explode?” the juror wondered. She said they also discussed the fact that law enforcement had not retrieved or bagged the sandwich as evidence, the way they would have done with an actual weapon, like a gun.
The jurors also debated Dunn’s motivation in transforming his turkey sub into a projectile. Was he just an overgrown toddler, having a tantrum? Would it have been different, they wondered, had he flung a rock, rather than deli meat on a soft baguette? Was this free speech or assault? Did it matter if his goal was to protect a vulnerable community?
Dunn’s lawyers presented a version of this explanation in court: Dunn said he had seen the officers standing outside a gay club, Bunker, that was hosting a “Latin Night.” He worried they were about to stage an immigration raid, so he got in their faces, calling them “racists” and “fascists” and repeatedly bellowing: “SHAME! SHAME!” His goal had been to draw them away from the club. (“I succeeded,” Dunn said, referring to the officers who left their perch in front of the club to swarm him as he ran away.) And the defense had likened Dunn’s act to a harmless “punctuation,” an “exclamation mark at the end of a verbal outburst”—an argument the juror told me that several of her peers found resonant.
But the biggest sticking point was whether Dunn had caused bodily harm. At one point, the jury sent a note, asking how “injury” is different from “bodily harm.” “The definition of injury isn’t just bodily harm—it’s offensive touch—and we struggled with that because we all said we’d be offended if a sandwich hit us, but then this agent was standing with about 14 other agents on the corner of 14th and U, all kitted out,” the juror told me…
Interesting Read: <em>Inside the Sandwich Guy’s Jury Deliberations</em>Post + Comments (104)
Just to have it all in one place: trump has at this point promised to use the tariff money to give everyone $2000 checks, do a massive farmer bailout, pay down the national debt, and eliminate income tax
— Hemry, Local Bartender (@bartenderhemry.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 2:58 PM
The con is so lazy and disrespectful I almost appreciate it. "I have a magic free money button! You idiots will believe anything!"
— Hemry, Local Bartender (@bartenderhemry.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 2:59 PM
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Genuinely yes you absolutely do need to stop assume your audience takes "seemingly obvious" things for granted in your political analysis! You would be shocked the amount of people who need it spelled out for them. Arguably you, for instance.
— politiburb (@politiburb.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 12:58 PM
If "of COURSE the gop is the primary author of our collective discontent" is such an obvious truth that it hardly bears saying out loud, how come there isn't a torture devised that could get some of the folks on this website to admit it? Do they all just have that much of an aversion to the obvious?
— politiburb (@politiburb.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 1:01 PM
"yeah yeah the republicans are bad and stuff, BUT TO GET BACK TO THE REAL TARGET OF MY RAGE, CHUCK SCHUMER!" is not a statement made by someone who is actually taking the first clause of it all that seriously.
— politiburb (@politiburb.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 1:03 PM
These people understand that the GOP is bad the same way rebellious teenagers understand that doing drugs is bad. They roll their eyes and mutter along "yeah yeah" at all the lives that have been destroyed, all the while thinking actually they wouldn't mind trying it just for fun
— politiburb (@politiburb.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 1:07 PM
what if we made the whole website out of people who are built different
— Richard R (@richardr.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 2:07 PM
It's the People's Front of Judea bit reenacted without a shred of awareness to near perfection, a truly staggering level of political incompetence, destined to never self correct.
— Eustis Bell (@eustisbellusaf.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 1:07 PM
It can be deeply terrifying to realize you're surrounded by tens of millions of people who want to destroy everything you love, but there are also tens of millions of people who want to fight them! They have a political party that you should want to be a part of!
— politiburb (@politiburb.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 5:48 PM
The Work. Never. Ends. Humanity is (hopefully!!) stuck here forever, and while we're here we have to help each other. And that means fixing broken systems, then our kids fix it again, then their kids fix it again. Looked at cynically, we're all Sisyphus.
But one must imagine Sisyphus happy.— politiburb (@politiburb.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 4:24 PM
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Meanwhile, Trump Take Parades:
The longest federal government shutdown on record is curtailing and outright canceling parades, ceremonies and other events across the U.S. that are normally held to mark Veterans Day.
— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) November 10, 2025 at 10:00 AM
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: <em>One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy</em>Post + Comments (693)
NOT GUILTY for Sean Dunn Sandwich Guy. Yessssss.
— Parkrose Permaculture ❌👑 (@parkroseperma.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 3:02 PM
From the DC hometown paper Washingtonian:
Sean Dunn, who will forever be known as Sandwich Guy, was found not guilty of misdemeanor assault by a jury in federal court in DC Thursday.
It was never in doubt that Dunn threw a sandwich at a federal officer at 14th and U streets in August, shouting, “Fuck you! You fucking fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!” according to a federal indictment. It’s also undeniable that Dunn’s airborne-footlong protest, video of which went viral, became an unlikely symbol of local resistance to the Trump administration during its crackdown on DC this summer, precisely because of the disconnect between the seriousness of the incident and the government’s response…
[US Attorney for DC Jeanine] Pirro’s office was unable to get a grand jury to OK felony charges against Dunn, though, and proceeded with misdemeanor charges anyway. Despite that embarrassment, the government agreed to Dunn’s attorney’s request for a jury trial in the matter. The trial, which began this week, was suitably absurd, with Customs and Border Patrol Agent Gregory Lairmore, who received the unwanted delivery of Dunn’s dinner, testifying that the sandwich “kind of exploded all over my uniform”—despite photos that showed it still in its wrapper on the ground afterward, prompting jokes like “If the sandwich don’t split, you must acquit.” On Thursday, a DC jury apparently agreed with that formulation.
Sean Dunn, aka DC Sandwich Guy, speaks outside court after his not guilty verdict:
“I am so happy that justice prevails in spite of everything….
“That night I believe I was protecting the rights of immigrants…
Every life matters, no matter where you came from, no matter how you got here…”— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 3:03 PM
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Remember Harry Dunn? (Probably no relation)…
DC Sandwich guy Sean Dunn has been found not guilty in the felony footlong exploding onion and mustard case!
— Harry Dunn (@libradunn1.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 2:47 PM
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DC’s a tough town for these cases, to be sure, and the first city to be hit by the Trump administration’s armed occupation. Fortunately for the rule of law — unfortunately, for a great many of the government’s victims — Trump has not only continued to send troops to a great many places, but generously shared his actions and his threats on social media, where even the normies can’t miss them. Jordan Rubin, for MSNBC:
… [T]he case of the man who became a folk hero in the nation’s capital follows a D.C. grand jury’s refusal to approve a felony indictment against him — seemingly a much rarer occurrence prior to Donald Trump’s second presidential term.
But this year has featured several such occurrences, in both the grand jury and at trial, in cases involving alleged assaults on law enforcement and the alleged solicitation of violence against Trump himself. Another D.C. jury returned a not guilty verdict in the case of Sidney Reid, whom prosecutors also charged with a misdemeanor assault after grand jurors refused to indict her an incredible three times. A federal jury outside of D.C. in Virginia returned a not guilty verdict in the case of a man alleged to have solicited Trump’s assassination with social media posts…
Ahead of trial, Dunn’s defense lawyers called his prosecution “a blatant abuse of power.” They argued that the government “has chosen to bring a criminal case over conduct so minor it would be comical — were it not for the unmistakable retaliatory motive behind it and the resulting risk to Mr. Dunn.” They noted that he “tossed a sandwich at a fully armed, heavily protected Customs and Border Protection” officer, but they maintained that “that act alone would never have drawn a federal charge. What did was the political speech that accompanied it.”
More Good News Open Thread: Hero Sandwich Guy Found Not GuiltyPost + Comments (226)
There’s a massive Zoom call this Tuesday evening “What’s Next”
www.mobilize.us/nokings/even…— Yaga ABBA (@729xhappier.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 5:10 PM
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Reminder: We spent YEARS reading thousands and thousands of articles on the Tea Party and how it was a true expression of the American people's will, and it never mounted anything nearly as big as Saturday's No Kings rallies. [1/3]
— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 3:54 PM
The Tea Party's biggest distributed event was on tax day 2009, with 750 modestly attended protests. No Kings had 2,600.
Its biggest single gathering was on 9/12/09 in DC, with somewhere between 75K and a few 100K participants. No Kings had 5-7 million.
So: No Kings dwarfs the Tea Party. [2/3]— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Does that mean it's more *important*? To be determined. The Tea Party mattered mostly because of how it took over the GOP like a toxic virus, driving it to far-right extremism and laying the foundation for Trumpism. We don't yet know what effect No Kings will have on the Democratic Party. [3/3]
— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 3:54 PM
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Paul Krugman, at his SubStack — “Civil Resistance Confronts the Autocracy”:
… I have a theory about the deeper purpose of the MAGA attacks on No Kings Day 2. America, I’d argue, is currently operating in a strange condition — what I would call a “bubble autocracy.” Donald Trump has not yet consolidated anything like absolute political power. But parts of our society — the Republican Party and a number of supposedly independent institutions like, say, CBS — are in effect living inside a bubble in which they operate as if he has. Within that bubble, a cult of personality around Trump has been built, a cult of personality worthy of Kim Jong Un. And to show their fealty to Dear Leader, Republicans must engage in bizarre rhetoric…
I attended Saturday’s No Kings Day march in Manhattan, for several reasons. As a citizen, I felt it was my duty. As a journalist, I wanted to see with my own eyes the mood, and whether there was violence either by or, far more likely, against the protestors. And I was, to be honest, feeling some anxiety about crowd size: a disappointing turnout would have been a significant blow to our chances of saving American democracy. No surprise that Trump attempted to discourage participation by declaring in advance that “I hear that very few people are going to be there,” while his lackeys spouted insane conspiracy theories.
I needn’t have worried. The march I joined was immense. G. Elliott Morris and the independent science newsroom Xylon estimate that 320,000 people protested in New York, and their median estimate is that more than 5 million protested nationwide. As Morris says, Saturday’s events were very likely “the biggest single-day protest since 1970.” Furthermore, the event was completely nonviolent: The New York Police Department reported zero arrests…
You talking about these two?
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) October 9, 2025 at 1:12 AM
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10 days until the biggest peaceful protests in modern American history. A No Kings Day event is likely happening near you wherever you are. Please join us to show we won’t cower in response to Trump’s authoritarian takeover: www.nokings.org?SQF_SOURCE=i… #NoKings
— Indivisible ??? (@indivisible.org) October 8, 2025 at 8:10 AM
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The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.
— The Daily Show (@thedailyshow.com) October 9, 2025 at 4:23 PM
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UPDATE: We filed for emergency relief to block the Trump-Vance admin's plot to facilitate illegal and inaccurate voter roll purges.
Any effort to tamper with election results by denying eligible people their right to vote is a serious threat to our democracy and must be met with swift legal force.— Democracy Forward (@democracyforward.org)
October 7, 2025 at 5:09 PM
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I'm guessing this will involve a lot of requests for money.
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) October 9, 2025 at 2:53 PM
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Absolutely love what @gregpak.net has going on at his NYCC booth (he also has comics but this is great). Booth L-25 in Artist Alley!
— Alex Zalben (@azalben.bsky.social) October 9, 2025 at 11:19 AM
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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Our Place Is In the ResistancePost + Comments (301)
