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Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know

Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know

Last updated on: December 8, 2025 at 9:30 am by Fred Clark

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Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know 2025-12-08T02:30:29-05:00 Fred Clark

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• I approve of this message from James McGrath: “Breaking the ICE with jokes.”

Jim presents a bunch of “ICE agent” jokes, all of which are repurposed from old Soviet-era Russian jokes. As he admits, not all of the jokes neatly apply, but at worst what his post does is collect a bunch of old Soviet-era Russian jokes.

Since he left out one of my favorites, I’ll add it here:

Guy walks up to a newsstand in Moscow, looks at the front pages of the newspapers, then shakes his head, grumbles something to himself, and walks off angrily.

The next day he does the same thing. And then the next, and the next.

After a week or so the guy at the newsstand says, “What’s your problem? How come you never buy a newspaper?”

Guy says, “I’m only interested in the obituaries.”

The newsstand guy says, “But you only look at the front pages! The obituaries are in the back.”

Guy says, “Not the one I’m looking for.”

• Speaking of old jokes, my dad had an old New Yorker cartoon hanging in his law office. It showed two lawyers slowly cooking in the cannibal’s stew pot of old New Yorker cartoons, with the one saying something like, “The problem with laws against eating people is that the kind of people who want to eat people don’t care what the law says.”

That’s sort of the point John Fea is getting at here in his discussion of that John Adams quote about how the American Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious People.” Adams wasn’t arguing for state religion or Christian nationalism, as the full quote shows:

Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition [and] Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

That full quote hits different today as we actually watch people driven by Avarice and Ambition plow through our constitutional checks and balances “as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Fea’s longer discussion of what Adams understood by “Avarice, Ambition [and] Revenge or Galantry” is helpful and fascinating, although I still wonder whether the similar comments about the necessity of religion and morality he cites from other “founding father” types weren’t coming from more of a “useful to keep the little people in line” perspective.

After all, the most accurate perspective on George Washington’s views on religion and morality probably came from someone who knew him better than any of his biographers: his long-time correspondent Oney Judge Staines.

• And speaking of ICE jokes, this long report on ICE’s rushed expansion by Shawn Cohen was published in the Daily Mail, a rag that, like the New York Post, isn’t reliably trustworthy. But, also like the Post, it has a knack for headlines: “Kristi Noem’s ICE hiring chaos laid bare as fat, illiterate and violent misfits ‘not ready to tie their own laces’ are recruited.”

It’s a long piece because it’s so full of examples: the recruits with pending criminal trial dates, the recruits with white supremacist or gang tatoos, the recruits who cannot pass the simplest academic or physical tests.

An exhaustive Daily Mail investigation has exposed how Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lowered standards so dramatically that the new cohort now includes recent high school graduates and applicants who can ‘barely read or write’ as well as those who lack basic physical fitness and even have pending criminal charges.

Most of the new hires in the $30 billion initiative are retired law enforcement who are receiving virtual training and being repurposed for desk duty.

Meanwhile, total novices are being fast-tracked into the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, where instructors have been left astounded at the levels of incompetence.

‘We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English,’ one Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official [said]. …

Insiders say the vetting process has been so rushed that officials didn’t even wait for drug test results to come back before hiring recruits and flying them off to Georgia, only to discover afterward that tests came back positive.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told President Trump on Tuesday that the department will hire its 10,000th ICE officer within ten days.

The Giant Slush Fund is being handed out like candy from the back of a windowless van. The promise of big signing bonuses is expanding the number of applicants, but the actual job — being a dirtbag enforcer for a repugnant, ruthless, lawless ethnic-cleansing scheme — severely restricts the quality of that application pool.

It’s a scummy job and the scum are lining up to take it.

• I posted this More Perfect Union video sometime last year, “What Dollar General Doesn’t Want You to Know.”

This report from the Guardian [UK] shows that nothing has improved since then, “How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices“:

Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.

Two things might explain this. One is that the store may be deliberately charging more than the advertised prices, figuring that most customers won’t track closely enough to raise a stink about it and they can pocket the profit. Another is that the company may be so focused on cutting labor costs that it will never hire enough workers to keep price-changes up to date.

That long report from the Guardian suggests the explanation is ¿Por qué no los dos? These companies are certainly far too stingy about labor costs to ever be able to keep their price-changes current. And they don’t seem to care about that because most customers are unlikely to fight over the deceptive pricing and will just pay the larger amount charged at the counter.

“You’re paying more because the retail industry doesn’t pay its workers enough” might be a hard thing for people to grasp, but in this case it’s very true.

• The title of this post comes from Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” which seems pretty catchy even if, as a certified Old Person, I can’t say I’m familiar with most of her oeuvre.

I’m using that song because the tiny big star recently snapped back at ICE after some of that agencies social media squad — the people trying to make fascism and ethnic cleansing “hip” — used another one of her songs in one of the agency’s Leni-Riefenstahl-meets-MTV hype videos. That masked-men-kidnap-brown-people video was posted online by the White House.

Carpenter responded with a post saying, “This video is evil and disgusting. Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”

“Trump Administration’s Cease And Desist Playlist Gains Another Star” was how Chris Williams summed that up. His post includes a playlist at the bottom of songs that artists have taken legal steps to prevent from being used by the Trump administration and its minions. It’s a long and sometimes surprising list, ending with Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno,” the song she stole back from ICE. I prefer “Espresso,” so here it is:

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