White House memos sent to No. 10 Downing St.

World's Greatest Blog Post of, like, right now....

It dawned on me today how tough marketing and branding must be. Like, whether a client contracts the services of a marketing company, or a start-up is trying to do it in-house, everyone's just trying to come up with a name, a logo, feelings to associate the brand with, etc. Not to mention a whole marketing strategy to give their brand/product an authentic feeling in a marketplace of ideas where, let's be honest, there are few truly new ideas.

Nonetheless you have to sit there, look at the product, and come up with all the ways this product is better than competing products, and all the ways it will make a buyer feel fulfilled. It's hard work. Seriously, how do you convince anyone that your brand of toilet paper is better than a competitors toilet paper? Both brands have different types with different levels of softness. And the brand is the last thing most people thing about when buying TP (All I'm thinking about is what I'll want to use an hour after eating spicy Pad Ki Mao from my favorite Thai place).

So yeah, hard job...

...then the GOP calls their healthcare bill "The World's Greatest Healthcare Plan of 2017".

No one thought "Ok, here we have the world's greatest healthcare plan, and yet how do I CONVINCE people it's the world's greatest?" No, they just gave it the name the way my 5 year old nephew might describe the family cat.

No nuance, no irony. It's just pure, literal condescension. This is the Republican Party of today. 

On February 8th, ICE carried out a raid against people exiting a hypothermia shelter at a church in Alexandria, VA. They waited until a group of men who appeared to be mestizo broke off from the group and then pounced. They released one and took the others. The detained men were loaded into a van already full of hispanic men, according to witnesses, and were taken away.

Questions from a local news source yielded a different story than what was described by witnesses.

  The official could not confirm other aspects of the men’s story, and insisted ICE does not detain people in vans, as the men described.

 “ICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy,” the statement continues, “ICE does not conduct sweeps or raids that target aliens indiscriminately.”

 The witness accounts were recorded in further news sources. What's clear from ICE's chilling response to this, as with practically any body now of a federal government controlled by Donald Trump, is that there will not be accurate information divulged to the public regarding their actions. Given the population being targeted, homeless immigrants, it will be very difficult for the detained men to receive any kind of assistance. ICE detention centers are growing, with the private prison industry earning huge profits because of it.