November 30, 2025 (Sunday)

On Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine that illuminated the administration’s approach to the world at home, as well as overseas. Authors Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson explained that the administration’s plan for peace was a Russian-led blueprint for joint U.S.-Russia economic cooperation that would funnel contracts for rebuilding Ukraine, extracting the valuable minerals in the Arctic, and even space exploration to a few favored U.S. and Russian businessmen.
Many of those business leaders have close ties to the White House.

“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told the journalists. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”

On ABC’s “This Week” this morning, Representative Don Bacon (R-NE), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said to host Jonathan Karl: “Putin’s the invader, he’s the dictator, he’s murdered all his opponents. But I just don’t see that moral clarity coming from the White House. We saw that Wall Street Journal article yesterday that many people around the president are hoping to make billions of dollars—these are all billionaires in their own right—from…Russia, if they get a favorable agreement with Ukraine. That alarms me tremendously. I want to see America being the leader of the free world, standing up for what’s right, not for who can make a buck…. I don’t want to see a foreign policy based on greed. I want to see it based on doing the right thing.”

There is far more at stake here than morality, although that is clearly on the table.

The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.

It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.

In the New York Times today, Cecilia Kang, Tripp Mickle, Ryan Mac, David Yaffe-Bellany, and Theodore Schleifer explored the story of David Sacks, an early technology entrepreneur with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who now advises the White House on AI and cryptocurrency policy while investing in the companies that benefit from those policies. Sacks has brought Silicon Valley leaders, including the chief executive of Nvidia, into contact with White House officials. Shortly after, the government got rid of restrictions on Nvidia’s chip sales to foreign countries, a change that could net Nvidia as much as $200 billion.

Tom Burgis of The Guardian explained today how the Trump family is using its position in the federal government to advance its personal interests and enrich itself. Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric have thrown themselves into cryptocurrency, broken ground on new golf courses, and rushed through permissions for new buildings in foreign countries at the same time U.S. government policies over tariffs, cryptocurrency, and pardons, for example, seem to advance those interests.

“The Trumps’ most natural allies,” Burgis wrote, “first in business, now also in politics—have long been the rulers of the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, who see no distinction between their states’ interests and their families’.”

When New York Times reporters Ken Bensinger and David Fahrenthold published an article about Trump disclosing the donors who funded his transition to his second term a full year after promising to do so, they noted that the 46 individuals on the released list included billionaires and others who were later appointed to office. White House spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said: “President Trump greatly appreciates his supporters and donors; however, unlike politicians of the past, he is not bought by anyone and does what’s in the best interest of the country. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

As wealth and power flow through the executive branch, Trump is overriding the rule of law that is designed to protect the rest of us from self-dealing by unscrupulous individuals. On Wednesday he commuted the sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, convicted in August 2024 of defrauding 10,000 investors in a $1.6 billion scheme that included securities and wire fraud. According to Kenneth P. Vogel of the New York Times, prosecutors said the victims were small business owners, teachers, nurses, farmers, and veterans: “hardworking, everyday people.” “I lost my whole life savings,” one victim wrote about his losses. “I am living from check to check.”

A judge sentenced Gentile to seven years in prison. He reported to authorities on November 14, was incarcerated, and was released less than two weeks later after Trump commuted his sentence.

There is a growing sense that an elite group of wealthy people is running the world without accountability to the law, and that the Trump administration is protecting and even advancing the people in that group. That sense is key to popular anger at the administration’s refusal to release the FBI files about its investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The documents from the Epstein estate released by the House Oversight Committee on November 12 showed a chummy friendship between Epstein and political, academic, and economic leaders eager to retain access to Epstein’s money, information, and connections even after he pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution.

MAGA voters backed Trump in the belief that he would hold such people to account, but it is now clear he is protecting them instead. Indeed, as Mona Charon of The Bulwark noted today, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon, whom Charon describes as “Trump’s consigliere, strategist, propagandist, and former senior counselor at the White House,” was on such friendly terms with Epstein that it was to him Epstein turned to scrub his public image after his initial guilty plea.

The realization that Trump is bolstering and protecting an entitled elite rather than defending everyday Americans victimized by them has dovetailed with this administration’s undermining of the economy, firing of civil servants, attacks on public health, and destruction of the nation’s social safety net to create angry references to “the Epstein class.”

Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) explained to NPR’s Scott Detrow earlier this month: “he Epstein class is a group of people with extreme wealth who have donated to politicians and been part of a system where they think the rules don’t apply to them, and they have created a system that has shafted a lot of forgotten Americans. That’s why Donald Trump ran and was central to his campaign. And many people, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, believe he’s become part of the swamp that he said he would drain. He’s forgotten the forgotten Americans he said he would stand up for.”

Unlike the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, today’s power elite is, as Anand Giridharadas of The Ink wrote on November 23 in the New York Times, a borderless network of people connected not to nations or their fellow citizens but to each other. They exchange nonpublic information and capital to enable the members of that group to control events, disregarding the effects of their decisions on those outside their network.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested Friday that the deep unpopularity of AI comes in part from the fact that it has become a symbol “of a society in which all the big decisions get made by the tech lords, for their own benefit and for a future society that doesn’t really seem to have a place for most of the rest of us.”

Popular anger at this “Epstein class” is sparking a political realignment. Democratic leaders have been hammering on how Republican policies benefit the wealthy at the same time that Trump’s tariffs send household costs upward and the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—slashes the social safety net and drives up the cost of health care premiums. The extraordinary demand for energy caused by the massive data centers AI requires has sent energy costs skyrocketing.

In November, voters turned away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats, expressing concerns about the economy and “affordability.” Chris Stein of The Guardian explained today how 33-year-old John McAuliff flipped a Republican seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in those elections. McAuliff attracted Republican voters by going door to door, talking with voters about data centers and the infrastructure they require and noting voters’ own rising electricity costs.

McAuliff told Stein that the rising prices are “essentially an artificial tax on everyday Virginians to benefit Amazon, Google, some of the companies with the biggest market in human history. Which is not to say they don’t provide benefits to those communities, but we need to do a much, much better job of extracting those benefits, because the companies can afford them.”

Voters’ anger at the administration’s support for the Epstein class is now so palpable it has inspired some MAGA leaders to try to cast themselves as populist leaders standing against the wealthy who control the government, a stand that puts them at odds with the White House. “I’ve always represented the common American man and woman as a member of the House of Representatives which is why I’ve always been despised in Washington DC and never fit in,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) began her resignation letter.

In 1932, in a similar time of political realignment, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt attracted voters across the political spectrum when he promised “a new deal for the American people,” with “more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.” “Let us…constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage,” he told the delegates to the Democratic National Convention when he accepted its nomination for president. “This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

December 1, 2025 (Monday)

President Donald J. Trump’s behavior over the holiday weekend has increased concern about his mental acuity. A rant on his social media account at midnight on Thanksgiving itself threatened to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants, called Minnesota governor Tim Walz a profoundly offensive slur, and ended: “HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”

On NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday, Walz responded by calling for Trump to release the results of an MRI he told reporters he underwent in October, later saying: “I have no idea what they analyze, but whatever they analyze, they analyzed it well and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.” Although Trump told reporters the MRI was part of his routine physical, medical experts say such tests are not routine.

Walz said to Kristen Welker: “Here we got a guy on Thanksgiving, where we spent time with our families, we ate, we played Yahtzee, we cheered for football or whatever. This guy is apparently in a room, ranting about everything else. This is not normal behavior. It is not healthy. And presidents throughout time have released a couple things. They’ve released their tax returns—not Donald Trump—and they’ve released their medical records—not Donald Trump. And look, the MRI is one thing, but I think what’s most concerning about this is, as your viewers out there are listening, has anyone in the history of the world ever had an MRI assigned to them and have no idea what it was for, as he says? So look, it’s clear the President’s fading physically. I think the mental capacity, again, ranting, you know, crazily at midnight on Thanksgiving about everything else. There’s reasons for us to be concerned. This is a guy that randomly says the airspace over Venezuela’s closed. He’s ruminating on if you could win a nuclear war. Look, this is a serious position. It’s the most powerful position in the world, and we have someone at midnight throwing around slurs that demonize our children, at the same time he’s not solving any of the problems. So I’m deeply concerned that he is incapable of doing the job.”

Last night, on Air Force One, Trump responded oddly to a reporter’s question about Walz’s call for Trump to release the MRI results: “f they want to release it, it’s okay with me to release it,” Trump said. “It’s perfect. It’s like my phone call where I got impeached. It’s absolutely perfect…. f you want to have it released, I’ll release it.” When a reporter asked “What part of your body was the MRI looking at?” Trump answered: “I have no idea. It was just an MRI. What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it. I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of doing,” he said, pointing at the female reporter. He then pointed at another female reporter and said: “You, too.”
Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt released a memo from the president’s physician, Sean P. Barbabella, saying that “advanced imaging” was performed on the president as a preventative measure. The memo said this imaging “was performed because men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.” It said Trump’s cardiovascular and abdominal imaging is “perfectly normal.”

Conspicuously absent from the memo was any reference to the president’s brain.

In the press conference, Leavitt also addressed Friday’s Washington Post story by Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima claiming that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Special Operations commander Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley to “kill everyone” in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela on September 2. After a first strike left two survivors clinging to burning wreckage, Bradley ordered a second strike that killed the survivors.

This so-called double tap has been widely condemned as unlawful and a war crime, although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yesterday appeared to make fun of those concerns. He posted an AI-faked cover of a children’s book featuring Franklin the Turtle with the title “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists.” It showed the fake Franklin in a military vest and helmet at the open door of a helicopter, firing what appears to be a rocket launcher at a burning small boat with a person and bundles in it while two other boats with armed men and bundles converge nearby. Above the image, the post read: “For your Christmas wish list…”

Hegseth might think targeting survivors is funny, but he’s about the only one who does. A strike on survivors who pose no threat is outside the bounds even of the administration’s own assertion that it can kill civilians it claims are “narco terrorists” who threaten the United States. That assertion itself has met significant disagreement from legal experts. But as Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz wrote today, the September 2 double tap that killed the two men “would be a violation of the laws of war even under the administration’s own self-justifying description of its campaign as an armed conflict with ‘narcoterrorists.’”

The development is so alarming that there has been bipartisan outcry among lawmakers. Democrats have spoken out forcefully, while the Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), have also publicly vowed to conduct oversight not just of the September 2 strike but of the entire operation. Representative Mike Turner (R-OH) explained: “There are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drug boats down in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the legal justification that’s been provided. But this is completely outside of anything that’s been discussed with Congress, and there is an ongoing investigation.”

Senator Angus King (I-ME), a lawyer who sits on both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan that “the law is clear. If the facts are as have been alleged, that there was a second strike specifically to kill the survivors in the water, that’s a stone cold war crime. It’s also murder. So the real question is who gave which orders, when were they given, and that’s what we’re going to get to the bottom of in the Congress…. It’s really a factual question. The law is totally clear.”

Today, Leavitt told reporters the administration believes the strike was lawful because it “was conducted in self defense to protect Americans and vital United States interests.” This justification would permit the president, or those acting in his name, to be judge, jury, and executioner without regard to the law.

But Leavitt was careful to distance both the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from the order. When asked by a reporter, “Does the administration deny that that second strike happened, or did it happen and the administration denies that Secretary Hegseth gave the order?” she said: “The latter is true.” She attributed the orders of September 2 to Admiral Bradley, appearing to be setting him up for underbussing.

This evening, Hegseth pushed Bradley under, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.” Commentator Brandon Friedman promptly posted: “Hegseth is very transparently blaming a Navy admiral for his own decision. Let this be a lesson for every other military officer: The Trump administration will issue unlawful orders, then blame you for following them.”

Hegseth’s Franklin post to dismiss what is shaping up to look like a war crime is an excellent illustration of this administration’s focus on their fantasy of what strength looks like. In The Atlantic today, national security scholar Tom Nichols called out Hegseth, the secretary of defense of the United States of America, for acting like “a sneering, spoiled punk who has been caught doing wrong and is now daring the local fuzz to take him in and risk the anger of his rich dad—a role fulfilled by Donald Trump, in this case.”

Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), whom the administration recently threatened to court martial and execute for recording a video to remind service members they must not follow an illegal order, called Hegseth “unqualified” for his job. “He runs around on a stage talking about lethality and warrior ethos and killing people.” But, Kelly said, “the most competent, capable military this planet has ever seen” needs direction about “mission and accountability and the rule of law and training,” as well as being “equipped to do really hard jobs.”

“Instead,” Kelly said, “he runs around on a stage like he’s a 12-year-old playing army. And it is ridiculous, it is embarrassing, and I can’t imagine what our allies think of looking at that guy in this job, one of the most important jobs in our country…. He is in the national command authority for nuclear weapons. And last night, he’s putting out on the internet turtles with rocket-propelled grenades…. This is the secretary of defense. This is not a serious person. He should have been fired after Signalgate. And then every single day after that.”

Hegseth is not the only Trump appointee unqualified for their job. Today a federal appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that Alina Habba, whom Trump placed in the position of acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, was appointed unlawfully. Trump appointed her to a 120-day acting appointment, after which the district court judges control the spot until the Senate confirms a new U.S. attorney. The judges rejected Habba, who has no experience as a prosecutor, and instead selected Desiree Leigh Grace, an experienced prosecutor, to lead the office. Attorney General Pam Bondi then fired Grace and maneuvered Habba back into control of the office.

“It is apparent that the current administration has been frustrated by some of the legal and political barriers to getting its appointees in place,” wrote Judge D. Michael Fisher in the opinion. But the judges say Trump cannot just get his way by ignoring the law.

Last week a federal judge found that Trump’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan to the post of U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was illegal and threw out the cases she had brought against former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James. Erica Orden of Politico noted today that federal judges have also found illegal Trump’s appointments of U.S. attorneys for the Central District of California and the District of Nevada.

“Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt released a memo from the president’s physician, Sean P. Barbabella, saying that “advanced imaging” was performed on the president as a preventative measure. The memo said this imaging “was performed because men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.” It said Trump’s cardiovascular and abdominal imaging is “perfectly normal.”

Conspicuously absent from the memo was any reference to the president’s brain.“

Seriously though, my money’s on a series of TIAs along with dementia. Be surprised if he made it til to midterms let alone 2028.

I’m also unconvinced he’s not experiencing congestive heart failure, but I’m no doctorologist.

Thanks for the post, Neophyte.

Divine Angel said:

“Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt released a memo from the president’s physician, Sean P. Barbabella, saying that “advanced imaging” was performed on the president as a preventative measure. The memo said this imaging “was performed because men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.” It said Trump’s cardiovascular and abdominal imaging is “perfectly normal.”

Conspicuously absent from the memo was any reference to the president’s brain.“

Seriously though, my money’s on a series of TIAs along with dementia. Be surprised if he made it til to midterms let alone 2028.

That’s What The Neuralink Implants Are For They Totally Won’t Zombie Mind Control The Captured Executive Branch Oh No

wait

Neophyte said:

December 1, 2025 (Monday)

But Leavitt was careful to distance both the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from the order. When asked by a reporter, “Does the administration deny that that second strike happened, or did it happen and the administration denies that Secretary Hegseth gave the order?” she said: “The latter is true.” She attributed the orders of September 2 to Admiral Bradley, appearing to be setting him up for underbussing.

This evening, Hegseth pushed Bradley under, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.” Commentator Brandon Friedman promptly posted: “Hegseth is very transparently blaming a Navy admiral for his own decision. Let this be a lesson for every other military officer: The Trump administration will issue unlawful orders, then blame you for following them.”

Is underbussing the Trump regime’s equivalent of Putin’s defenestration of perceived enemies?

AussieDJ said:

Neophyte said:

December 1, 2025 (Monday)

But Leavitt was careful to distance both the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from the order. When asked by a reporter, “Does the administration deny that that second strike happened, or did it happen and the administration denies that Secretary Hegseth gave the order?” she said: “The latter is true.” She attributed the orders of September 2 to Admiral Bradley, appearing to be setting him up for underbussing.

This evening, Hegseth pushed Bradley under, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.” Commentator Brandon Friedman promptly posted: “Hegseth is very transparently blaming a Navy admiral for his own decision. Let this be a lesson for every other military officer: The Trump administration will issue unlawful orders, then blame you for following them.”

Is underbussing the Trump regime’s equivalent of Putin’s defenestration of perceived enemies?

The Admirals and Generals can blame Trump, that’s fair.

December 2, 2025 (Tuesday)

The news of last Friday, November 28, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Joint Special Operations commander overseeing an attack on a small vessel carrying 11 people on September 2 to “kill everybody” is shaping up to be a fight over control of the United States government.

A missile strike shattered the boat and set it afire, but two men survived. A second strike fulfilled Hegseth’s order. According to Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, the commander, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, said “the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” In a report, the Joint Special Operations Command said the second strike was not to kill survivors, but to remove a navigation hazard.

There had already been significant pushback in the first place over the strikes, which legal experts say are unlawful. But the so-called double tap is illegal and a war crime even under the Trump administration’s flimsy justification for the strikes.

Lawmakers of both parties have pushed back on what Senator Angus King (I-ME) yesterday called “a stone cold war crime.” The Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), have vowed to launch investigations of the incident, as well as of the larger operation.

Yesterday, Hegseth and President Donald Trump began to distance themselves from the strike. Last night, Hegseth pinned the blame for the order on Admiral Bradley, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.”

Today, at a televised meeting, Trump’s Cabinet officers rallied around the president, telling him he is brilliant and a miracle worker, and Trump threw his support behind Hegseth. Clearly, the president intends to stand by the weekend Fox News Channel host he installed in one of the most important positions in the United States government.

Shortly after the meeting, PBS NewsHour journalist Nick Schifrin reported that a U.S. official told him “he US military struck the boat on September 2_four_times: twice to kill the 11 people who were on board, and twice more to sink the boat.”

Trump is slipping. After he drew attention by posting wildly on social media last night, today’s meeting was clearly designed to demonstrate that the president is alert, active, and on top of things. But this made-for-television photo opportunity was anything but a display of competence: Trump could not stay awake while his Cabinet members were praising him, and so we had the wild visual of Secretary of State Marco Rubio praising Trump as the only man who could end Russia’s war in Ukraine, gesturing at the president sitting next to him, who was, to all appearances, sound asleep.

At the Cabinet meeting today, Trump announced that “the word ‘affordability’ is a Democrat scam,” insisting falsely that his economic policies were bringing down costs. Trump won the 2024 election in large part by promising to bring down inflation, but prices have risen under him at the same time that the economy is slowing.

G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers pointed out today that Americans’ concerns about affordability are not just about costs, though. They are concerns about social mobility, economic inequality, and fairness, values that run opposite of Trump’s focus on funneling contracts and privileges to well-connected billionaires. People are unlikely to change their minds about the unreasonable power of that “Epstein class” as the deadline for the release of the Epstein files gets closer.

Now Trump’s defense secretary, already in trouble for sharing classified information about a strike on Yemen’s Houthis over a non-secure messaging app on which a reporter had been included, is tangled up in a war crime. Today, libertarian conservative writer George Will noted in the Washington Post: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” Will went on to refer to the Trump administration as a “moral slum.”

On Sunday, Miranda Devine of the New York Post reported on a leaked document written for congressional leadership by retired and active-duty FBI agents and analysts of the first six months of Kash Patel’s leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They said Patel is “in over his head” and that deputy FBI director Dan Bongino is “something of a clown.” Both Patel and Bongino are arrogant, the report says, and have an “unfortunate obsession with social media.” Under Patel, they say, the FBI is a “rudderless ship” and “all f*cked up.”

Trump made it clear during the Cabinet meeting that he has embraced the white nationalism of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who reject the nation’s longstanding principle of welcoming immigrants and have vowed to purge the nation of them, concentrating on those who are Brown and Black. Yesterday, Noem called them “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

“I hear…Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions,” Trump said of Minnesota. “Every year, billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%, they contribute nothing. I don’t want ‘em in our country, I’ll be honest with you, okay. Somebody would say, ‘Oh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want ‘em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want ‘em in our country. I can say that about other countries, too. I can say it about other countries, too. We don’t want them the hell, we gotta—we have to rebuild our country.”

Trump embraced the idea, popular with white nationalists and the neo-Nazi right wing, that the U.S. must reject the multiculturalism of our entire history or perish. “You know, our country’s at a tipping point,” he said. “We could go bad. We’re at a tipping point. I don’t know people mind me saying that, but I’m saying it. We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

Then he turned on an elected representative, using dehumanizing rhetoric historically associated with violence against a people. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work, these aren’t people that say, ‘Let’s go. Come on, let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing. You know, if they came from Paradise, and they said, ‘This isn’t Paradise.’ But when they come from hell, and they complain and do nothing but b*tch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”

The Cabinet appeared to applaud, although it is not clear whether they were agreeing or hoping to stop him from talking like a Nazi.

Tonight the administration put Miller and Noem’s policy into place, pausing all immigration applications from 19 countries and halting the processing of green cards and citizenship applications. Federal authorities say they will target Somali immigrants in Minneapolis–St. Paul in an upcoming sweep, although Jaylani Hussain, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says about 95% of the Somalis in Minnesota are already U.S. citizens and that about 50% were born in the U.S.

According to Mike Balsamo and Steve Karnowski of the Associated Press, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey says Trump’s attack on Somalis “violates the moral fabric of what we stand by in this country as Americans. They have started businesses and created jobs. They have added to the cultural fabric of what Minneapolis is.” Minneapolis police—many of them Somali—will not work with federal officials in the sweep.

Also tonight, Trump announced that because former president Joe Biden used an autopen, “ny and all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts,” pardons, and commutations he signed are “invalid.” This is bonkers, of course. All modern presidents have used autopens, including Trump himself, and there is no mechanism in the Constitution for erasing the actions of a previous president by fiat.

More to the point, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket pointed out, Trump himself said he had no idea who crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao was after having pardoned him. And in March, Trump told reporters he had not signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, although his signature appears on the proclamation in the Federal Register.

Ta.

Hold up, is that the Australian Miranda Devine?

Divine Angel said:

Hold up, is that the Australian Miranda Devine?

Yes.

December 3, 2025 (Wednesday)

Republican Matt Van Epps won yesterday’s special election in Tennessee’s seventh congressional district, but Republicans aren’t celebrating triumphantly. Van Epps beat out Democrat Aftyn Behn by about 9 points in a district Donald Trump and Republican senator Marsha Blackburn each won in 2024 by 22 points. Yesterday’s vote shows a 13-point shift toward the Democrats in about a year.

Aaron Pellish and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported the comment of a House Republican after officials called the election: “Tonight is a sign that 2026 is going to be a b*tch of an election cycle. Republicans can survive if we play team and the Trump administration officials play smart. Neither is certain.”

As G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted, “he fact that a rural Tennessee district ended up just a high-single-digits win for Republicans should be a five-alarm fire for the party ahead of the 2026 midterms.” Morris explains that congressional special elections have swung 17 points on average toward the Democrats, while special elections for seats in state legislatures have swung toward the Democrats by about 11 points. Morris combines these results with turnout differences in special, midterm, and presidential elections, to estimate that—as of right now—the 2026 midterms can be expected to see a swing of 7 to 8 points toward the Democrats. These numbers would give Democrats control of the House of Representatives and put the Senate into play as well.

It is safe to assume, Morris says, “that something big has shifted in the national environment.” He adds that the Republican Party “will likely find itself defending an unusually wide array of seats next year, even in districts previously thought to be immune to national swings.”

Democrats and many Republicans think that shift has come about in large part over the issue of affordability, the rising costs of food, housing, energy, gasoline, and healthcare that are squeezing most Americans. Trump insisted yesterday that “affordability” doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” but most Americans would disagree. According to Morris of Strength in Numbers, the word “affordability” appears to mean not just the pressure of higher prices, but also frustration at economic stagnation, the unfair way in which the economic system operates, the idea of being stuck and unable to rise, the current illusiveness of the American dream.

After the voters rejected Republican candidates in the early November elections, Republicans vowed they would address affordability issues. Trump initially moved in that direction but now is rejecting the idea that his economic policies have caused hardship, although news dropped today from Automatic Data Processing (ADP), a private human resources management company, that the U.S. lost about 32,000 jobs last month. The losses were primarily in small businesses, which are often considered a bellwether for the rest of the economy.

The secretary of commerce, billionaire Howard Lutnick, admitted to CNBC that Trump’s policies have caused disruption, but promised they would start to build the economy in 2026. “Remember,” he said, “as you deport people, that’s going to suppress private job numbers of small businesses. But they’ll rebalance and they’ll regrow. So I think this is just a near-term event and you’ll see as the numbers come through over the next couple of months, you’ll see that all pass, and next year the numbers are going to be fantastic.”

On the table more immediately are the rising costs of health insurance premiums. The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July extended tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations but neglected to extend the premium tax credits that supported the purchase of healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act insurance markets. The loss of those credits will throw at least two million people off healthcare insurance while driving up healthcare costs for millions more. This will undermine the Affordable Care Act, a goal many Republicans have held since the measure became law about fifteen years ago. But in September, close to 80% of Americans wanted the credits extended; as the issue became politicized, some Republicans withdrew their support so the number dropped to about 75%.

In October, Senate Democrats refused to agree to vote in favor of a continuing resolution to fund the government unless the Republicans extended that premium tax credit, but after weeks of party members calling attention to the issue, seven Democrats and one Independent voted in November to end the shutdown in exchange for a Senate vote on a measure to extend the tax credits.

That bill is now coming due, trapping Republicans between their ideology, which calls for slashing all government programs, and voters, who overwhelmingly want the credits extended.

Trump said he was going to produce a healthcare plan that would extend the premium tax credit for two years, along with new restrictions on who could use the credits, by last Monday but postponed the announcement after Republican lawmakers demanded the extension include a nationwide abortion ban. The White House has not indicated when a new plan might appear. On Air Force One, Trump told reporters he doesn’t actually want to extend the tax credits. “I’d rather not extend them at all,” he said. “It may be, some kind of an extension may be necessary to get something else done, because the Unaffordable Care Act has been a disaster.”

Kaia Hubbard of CBS News notes that any plan Senate Democrats come up with will need the support of 13 Republicans to pass the 60-vote Senate filibuster threshold. So far, though, Republican senators seem inclined not to extend the credits as they currently exist, but to try to force through a partisan measure that Democrats will not support. Republican senators are proposing different options, but say there is no point in figuring out their own position until Trump tells them what he is willing to sign.

In the House, Republicans in safe districts don’t want to extend the credits, saying that an end to support for the system will make it easier to kill the law they insist is a disaster. According to Alice Miranda Ollstein and Robert King of Politico, some Republican strategists think that voters won’t care about healthcare costs by the time of the midterm elections, especially if Republican policies bring down the costs of housing, energy, food, and gas. They think voters will be angrier at support for the Affordable Care Act than at higher healthcare costs.

Vulnerable Republicans disagree. They are calling for a temporary extension of the credits to help lower costs again before the midterms.

Meanwhile, House Democrats have announced they have 214 signatures on a discharge petition to force a vote on extending the tax credits and invited Republicans to join them to bring the measure to the floor. Today, Democratic caucus chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) told reporters: “Republicans have said that they want an extension, that they support the Affordable Care Act tax credits. We’re giving them an opportunity to do that. That’s what this discharge petition is about. As Leader Jeffries has said for months, Democrats will go anywhere and have any discussion with our Republican colleagues about addressing the Affordable Care Act tax credits or the affordability crisis. If Republicans want to have a conversation about solutions, we’re all ears.”

The declining fortunes of MAGA Republicans are widening the rifts in the party. Annie Karni of the New York Times reported today on House Republicans’ anger at Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has defended the priorities of President Donald J. Trump at the expense of the interests of Republican lawmakers. Johnson’s letting Trump call the shots means the House has accomplished very little apart from passing the budget reconciliation bill Republicans call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a law the American people appear to hate.

Although Republicans hold the majority in the House, Johnson has kept the members subservient to Trump’s demands. He kept them out of session for almost eight weeks during the government shutdown, for example, to try to jam the Senate into either accepting the House version of a continuing resolution to fund the government or ending the filibuster to enable Trump to force through his unpopular policies. Now, angry that they will have to run in 2026 with little to show for their House majority, House members are talking to the media about their frustration with Johnson.

The Republicans have other concerns as well. Today House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed former special counsel Jack Smith to testify in private, rejecting Smith’s offer to testify in public. Smith wanted to testify in public to prevent committee members from leaking his comments selectively to the press, spinning them to mislead Trump loyalists. But public testimony could expose some of the evidence Smith gathered about President Trump’s participation in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and retention of classified documents.

In a statement, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked: “What are our colleagues so afraid of, that they won’t let the American people hear directly from the Special Counsel?… The American people deserve to hear the full unvarnished truth about Special Counsel Smith’s years-long effort to investigate and prosecute the crimes committed by Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.”

Also today, Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Jeffrey Merkley (D-OR), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), along with Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking for a briefing no later than Friday on what she has claimed is “new” material in the Epstein files that she said on November 14 had caused her to initiate investigations into connections between Jeffrey Epstein and former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Larry Summers, and investor Reid Hoffman. On July 7, an FBI memo said there was no new evidence to open new investigations “against uncharged third parties.”

Now the bipartisan lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act from both chambers of Congress are calling out what looks to be Bondi’s attempt to shield Trump, first by saying that there was no information in the files that would warrant an investigation of “uncharged third parties” and then by opening such investigations on Democrats to muddy the waters and possibly claim that she could not release the files because of ongoing investigations.

The lawmakers noted they “are particularly focused on understanding the contents of any new evidence, information or procedural hurdles that could interfere with the Department’s ability meet statutory deadline” of December 19, and expressed their interest in making sure “the law is fully implemented.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about what HCR will say when Trump kicks the bucket.

“Eight presidents have died in office, and last night, a ninth joined them.”

Ta.

Divine Angel said:

Lately I’ve been thinking about what HCR will say when Trump kicks the bucket.

“Eight presidents have died in office, and last night, a ninth joined them.”

He might not die in office, I suppose.

December 4, 2025 (Thursday)

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, said. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel,… killed by the United States.”
Himes was talking about a video of a U.S. strike against two survivors of a first strike in the Caribbean on a small boat allegedly carrying cocaine to the U.S. Today Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the Special Operations commander who ordered the strike, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine briefed members of Congress in a closed-door session on the events of that day.

The U.S. attacked the boat on September 2, in an unannounced operation against what it claims are drug runners, meaning the men on the boat had no way of knowing they were targets. After the strike, the administration announced it had begun strikes against what it insists are drug boats manned by gang members.

The administration says President Donald Trump has “determined” that the U.S. is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that those in the boats are formally “combatants,” but it has not reinforced those claims with the legal authority they need. After informing Congress of the strikes on September 4 to ensure Congress was “fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution,” Trump has since ignored that resolution, which requires congressional approval for hostile actions to continue longer than 60 days, a deadline that passed in early November.

As Charlie Savage explained today in the New York Times, legal experts say this operation is not lawful. Civilians engaged in trade—even illicit trade—are not enemy combatants. For that matter, the public, so far, has seen no hard evidence but only heard the administration’s claim that the boats are engaged in drug trafficking.

Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, and Haley Britzky of CNN explained that the initial strike of September 2 killed nine of the eleven people on the boat immediately. It set the vessel on fire and split it in half, capsizing it and leaving two survivors clinging to the wreckage. For the next 41 minutes, U.S. officers watched as the men struggled to right what was left of the boat. Then, rather than rescuing the two men, Admiral Bradley ordered a second strike that killed them, now saying he intended to destroy the vessel, which the administration claims was a military target.

Shelby Holliday and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal reported last night that Bradley would tell Congress that the men appeared to be communicating by radio with other “enemy” vessels in the area and thus were still combatants, an argument defense officials have been making for weeks now. But Bradley did not say that today. Instead, he admitted the men were in no position to communicate with other vessels. He told congressional lawmakers that he ordered the strike because the vessel appeared to be afloat thanks to packages of cocaine and that the survivors could have floated to safety and continued to traffic the drugs.

A source told the CNN reporters that Bradley’s rationale was “f*cking insane.”

Even if the U.S. is at war with drug traffickers—a dubious argument—it is a war crime to kill individuals who are “outside of combat,” no longer posing an imminent threat. It’s hard to imagine that two unarmed, shipwrecked men trying to right the remains of a capsized boat in the ocean hundreds of miles from the U.S. posed a threat.

While some Republicans—notably Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas— are defending the strike, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said: “There is a difference between being accused of being a bad guy and being a bad guy. It is called the presumption of innocence. It is called due process. It is called, basically, justice that our country was founded upon.”

Paul told MS NOW columnist Eric Michael Garcia he wanted Hegseth to testify before Congress under oath, saying that “Congress, if they had any kind of gumption at all, would not be allow administration to summarily execute people that are suspected of a crime.” He said he wanted the full video of the strikes released: “f the public sees images of people clinging to boat debris and being blown up, I think that there is a chance that finally, the public will get interested enough in this to stop this.”

Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “I am deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning. The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2nd strike, as the President has agreed to do. This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump Administration’s military activities, and demonstrates exactly why the Senate Armed Services Committee has repeatedly requested—and been denied—fundamental information, documents, and facts about this operation. This must and will be beginning of our investigation into this incident.”

As of this morning, the U.S. had carried out more than 20 strikes on the small boats the president says are run by “narco-terrorists,” killing at least 87 people.

This evening, Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point USA posted on social media: “Every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean.”

Hegseth quoted Kolvet and commented: “Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat.”

U.S. Southern Command confirmed the strike against a small boat in the eastern Pacific, saying that “ntelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route…. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed.”

December 5, 2025 (Friday)

Late last night, the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America. It did so quietly, although as foreign affairs journalist at Politico Nahal Toosi noted, the release of the NSS is usually accompanied by fanfare, as it shows an administration’s foreign policy priorities and the way it envisions the position of the U.S. in the world.

The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

After a brief introduction touting what it claims are the administration’s great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II Allies put in place after that war to prevent another world war. The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined “the character of our nation.”

Their vision of “our country’s inherent greatness and decency,” requires “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” “an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age,” and “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”

Observers referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and “fourteen words” to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan.

To achieve their white supremacist country, the document’s authors insist they will not permit “transnational and international organizations foreign powers or entities” to undermine U.S. sovereignty. To that end, they reject immigration as well as “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

The document reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia. The authors reject Europe’s current course, suggesting that Europe is in danger of “civilizational erasure” and calling for the U.S. to “help Europe correct its current trajectory” by “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Allowing continued migration will render Europe “unrecognizable” within twenty years, the authors say, and they back away from NATO by suggesting that as they become more multicultural, Europe’s societies might have a different relationship to NATO than “those who signed the NATO charter.”

In contrast to their complaints about the liberal democracies in Europe, the document’s authors do not suggest that Russia is a country of concern to the U.S., a dramatic change from past NSS documents. Instead, they complain that “European officials…hold unrealistic expectations” for an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, and that European governments are suppressing far-right political parties. They bow to Russian demands by calling for “nding the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

In place of the post–World War II rules-based international order, the Trump administration’s NSS commits the U.S. to a world divided into spheres of interest by dominant countries. It calls for the U.S. to dominate the Western Hemisphere through what it calls “commercial diplomacy,” using “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” and discouraging Latin American nations from working with other nations. “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” it says, “a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

The document calls for “closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

It went on to make clear that this policy is a plan to help U.S. businesses take over Latin America and, perhaps, Canada. “The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities for assessment by every U.S. Government financing program,” it said, “including but not limited to those within the Departments of State, War, and Energy; the Small Business Administration; the International Development Finance Corporation; the Export-Import Bank; and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.” Should countries oppose such U.S. initiatives, it said, “he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.”

The document calls this policy a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, linking this dramatic reworking to America’s past to make it sound as if it is historical, when it is anything but.

President James Monroe outlined what became known as the Monroe Doctrine in three paragraphs in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. The concept was an attempt for the new American nation to position itself in a changing world.

In the early nineteenth century, Spain’s empire in America was crumbling, and beginning in 1810, Latin American countries began to seize their independence. In just two years from 1821 to 1822, ten nations broke from the Spanish empire. Spain had restricted trade with its American colonies, and the U.S. wanted to trade with these new nations. But Monroe and his advisors worried that the new nations would fall prey to other European colonial powers, severing new trade ties with the U.S. and orienting the new nations back toward Europe.

So in his 1823 annual message, Monroe warned that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” American republics would not tolerate European monarchies and their system of colonization, he wrote. Americans would “consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” It is “the true policy of the United States to leave the to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course,” Monroe wrote.

In fact, with very little naval power, there wasn’t much the U.S. could do to enforce this edict until after the Civil War, when the U.S. turned its attention southward. In the late nineteenth century, U.S. corporations joined those from European countries to invest in Latin American countries. By the turn of the century, when it looked as if those countries might default on their debts, European creditors threatened armed intervention to collect.

After British, German, and Italian gunboats blockaded the ports of Venezuela in 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt sent Marines to the Dominican Republic to manage that nation’s debt, the president announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. On December 6, 1904, he noted with regret that “here is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought.” If countries allowed the wrong, he wrote, they “put a premium upon brutality and aggression.”

“Until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international control over offending nations,” he wrote, “powers…with most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong” must “serve the purposes of international police.” Such a role meant protecting Latin American nations from foreign military intervention; it also meant imposing U.S. force on nations whose “inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.”

Couched as a form of protection, the Roosevelt Corollary justified U.S. military intervention in Latin American countries, but it still recognized those nations’ right to independence.

Now Trump has added his own “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, promising not to protect Latin American countries from foreign intrusion but to “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.” In a speech in January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that the administration is “more than willing to use America’s considerable leverage to protect our interests.”

The administration says it will promote “tolerable stability in the region” by turning the U.S. military away from its European commitments and focusing instead on Latin America, where it will abandon the “failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades” and instead use lethal force when necessary to secure the U.S. border and defeat drug cartels.

Then, it says, the U.S. will extract resources from the region. “The Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should partner with regional allies to develop,” the plan says, “to make neighboring countries as well as our own more prosperous.”

Walking away from the U.S.-led international systems that reinforce the principles of national self-determination and have kept the world relatively safe since World War II, the Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, among others.

National security specialist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The new National Security Strategy is a propaganda document, designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide. Hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly.”

European Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ulrike Franke commented: “The transatlantic relationship as we know it is over. Yes, we kinda knew this. But this is now official US White House policy. Not a speech, not a statement. The West as it used to be no longer exists.”

Today, Gram Slattery and Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported that Pentagon officials this week told European diplomats in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. wants Europe to take over most of NATO’s defense capabilities by 2027.

buffy said:

December 5, 2025 (Friday)

Late last night, the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America. It did so quietly, although as foreign affairs journalist at Politico Nahal Toosi noted, the release of the NSS is usually accompanied by fanfare, as it shows an administration’s foreign policy priorities and the way it envisions the position of the U.S. in the world.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

December 6, 2025 (Saturday)

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.

In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.

Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

The next day, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America, and on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.

The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.

Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.

The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were Black American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Indigenous Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?

Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.

But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.

President Donald J. Trump and his cronies have abandoned the principles of democracy and openly embraced the hierarchical society the U.S. fought against in World War II. They have fired women, Black Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans from positions in the government and the military and erased them from official histories. They have seized, incarcerated and deported immigrants— or rendered them to third countries to be tortured— and have sent federal agents and federal troops into Democratic-led cities to terrorize the people living there.

They have traded the rule of law for the rule of Trump, weaponizing the Department of Justice against those they perceive as enemies, pardoning loyalists convicted of crimes, and now, executing those they declare are members of drug cartels without evidence, charges, or trials. They have openly rejected the world based on shared values of equality and democracy for which Americans fought in World War II. In its place, they are building a world dominated by a small group of elites close to Trump, who are raking in vast amounts of money from their machinations.

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.

We hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the radical right will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

Thanks.

December 7, 2025 (Sunday)

“I think it’s really important that this video be made public,” Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said today on Face the Nation. Himes was referring to a video of the September 2 U.S. military strike on a small boat with 11 people on it. In that attack, the first strike broke the boat apart and set it on fire. The strike killed nine people but left two alive, clinging to the remains of the vessel. On Friday,

“It’s not lost on anyone, of course, that the interpretation of the video, which, you know, six or seven of us had an opportunity to see last week, broke down precisely on party lines. And so this is an instance in which I think the American public needs to judge for itself.”

Himes said he knew how the public would react because it left him profoundly shaken, even though as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, he has “spent years looking at videos of lethal action taken,” including against terrorists. Himes said he realizes that “there’s a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners. But,” he added, “I think it’s really important that people see what it looks like when the full force of the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under, just so that they have sort of a visceral feel for what it is that we’re doing.”

On Friday, Julian E. Barnes and Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported that those who have seen the video reported that the two survivors of the first strike were waving to something overhead before the second strike killed them. The journalists also note that, as there had been no announcement of the administration’s new plan to strike alleged drug traffickers rather than stopping them and turning their operators over to law enforcement, the men had no way of knowing they were under attack.

Some of those who saw the video thought the men were waving to be rescued. Those who support President Donald J. Trump’s argument that the civilians potentially trafficking drugs are enemy combatants—an argument legal analysts widely reject—say the men could have been trying to wave to other alleged drug traffickers to come get them and salvage the cocaine on the boat, although there were no other boats or aircraft in visual range.

Also on Friday, Natasha Bertrand of CNN reported that the boat the U.S. military struck on September 2 was not, in fact, headed for the U.S., a claim from the president that had always seemed doubtful because of how far away from the U.S. the small boats the U.S. has been hitting are. Instead, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who was overseeing Special Operations on that day, told Congress that the intelligence he received said the boat was on its way to meet a larger vessel bound for Suriname, a small South American country to the east of Venezuela, to transfer drugs to it. Bradley told the lawmakers that the military could not find the second, larger vessel.

According to U.S. drug enforcement officials, drugs trafficked through Suriname generally are bound for Europe. Bradley also confirmed that after the people on the boat appeared to see American aircraft, they had turned the boat back toward land.

Bill Kristol of The Bulwark wrote: “If the Sep. 2 boat really had ‘narco-terrorists’ on board, questioning the survivors would have been a way to learn about how the organization worked, where more drugs were stashed, etc. But this isn’t a counter-terrorism campaign. It’s a shooting gallery with helpless targets.”

In a speech at the the Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in California yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told attendees: “The war department will not be distracted by democracy building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation building.” He said that Trump has the power to take military action “as he sees fit” to defend the U.S., and defended the strikes on small boats off the coast of Venezuela, including the strikes of September 2.

Democrats and some Republicans are not okay with Hegseth’s assertion of the president’s power to strike the boats without input from Congress. They have been calling for the release of the September 2 video since they saw it on Thursday. Amelia Benavides-Colón of NOTUS reported today that Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told MS NOW he has already talked to the chairs of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees—he sits on both—about using a subpoena to get the video released.

Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, today told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News: “It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it, because it’s very, very difficult to justify.”
When asked if he would make the footage public, Hegseth told the defense forum: “Whatever we were to decide to release, we’d have to be very responsible about reviewing that right now.”

Coming less than a week after the release of a damning report from the inspector general of the Defense Department about Hegseth’s use of the non-secure messaging app Signal, this rings hollow. After the chair and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee requested an investigation, the acting inspector general, Steven A. Stebbins, reviewed Hegseth’s use of Signal in a March chat revealed by editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been inadvertently included in it.

Stebbins’s report, released to the public on December 2, concluded that Hegseth “sent sensitive, nonpublic, operational information” over Signal on his personal cell phone, against Department of Defense policy. It explained that U.S. Central Command, whose area of responsibility includes the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia, sent Hegseth seven emails classified as secret and not releasable to foreign nationals (SECRET/NOFORN) before and during a set of strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen on March 14 and 15. Hegseth transmitted the information in them, including details about targets, weapons packages, aircraft, and strike times, to the people on the Signal chat.

The defense secretary has the authority to declassify information, and Hegseth claimed he had done so. He said he determined the material he shared didn’t have to be classified because “there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission.” On Wednesday, the day after the report came out, Hegseth relied on his authority to declassify material to claim he had not shared anything inappropriately and that the report had cleared him. “No classified information. Total exoneration,” he wrote on social media. “Thank you for your attention to this IG report.”

But while the inspector general acknowledged that, by virtue of his position, Hegseth had the power to declassify information and thus avoid consequences for sharing such information, he nonetheless concluded that “if this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes. Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”

Hegseth refused to cooperate with the investigation, refusing either to talk to Stebbins or to let the inspector general have access to his phone. For information about the messaging, Stebbins had to rely on The Atlantic’s publication of the messages. The article showed messages the printout offered by the Defense Department didn’t have because Signal had been set to delete them—another breach of policy, which requires that official records be retained.

Representative Smith’s suggestion that the White House and Hegseth don’t want people to see the September 2 video seems more likely than Hegseth’s concern about being “very responsible” about reviewing the video footage.

Although American lawmakers are deeply troubled with strikes that seem illegal and may be war crimes, Russian officials are happy with U.S. foreign policy. They welcomed the National Security Strategy the Trump administration released on Thursday, saying that “he adjustments we’re seeing…are largely consistent with our vision.”

That document announced the U.S. will back away from the global alliances formed in the wake of World War II and called for making sure the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the organization that has opposed first Soviet and now Russian aggression since 1949, doesn’t continue to expand. The administration’s document calls for a world dominated not by a rules-based international order in which countries must respect each other’s sovereignty, but by a few major powers that control weaker nations in their sphere of influence.

There has been an outcry over the National Security Strategy, with Europeans and other U.S. allies warning that they can no longer trust the U.S. Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk posted on social media: “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem. And we have common enemies. At least that’s how it has been in the last 80 years. We need to stick to this, this is the only reasonable strategy of our common security. Unless something has changed.”

But former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on social media yesterday: “At a moment in American politics in which Trump has very low approval ratings, Democrats are winning elections, many predict a blue wave in 2026 & a Democratic president in 2028, and a solid majority of Americans support NATO, it would be imprudent to get too fatalistic about the death of Transatlantic relations because of an incoherent National Security Strategy written by a small group in the Trump administration. Play the long game.”

Ta.

>>Instead, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who was overseeing Special Operations on that day, told Congress that the intelligence he received said the boat was on its way to meet a larger vessel bound for Suriname, a small South American country to the east of Venezuela, to transfer drugs to it. Bradley told the lawmakers that the military could not find the second, larger vessel.<<

As Mr buffy commented yesterday when we heard this on the radio…so…can find a little boat but not a big boat?!

buffy said:

>>Instead, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who was overseeing Special Operations on that day, told Congress that the intelligence he received said the boat was on its way to meet a larger vessel bound for Suriname, a small South American country to the east of Venezuela, to transfer drugs to it. Bradley told the lawmakers that the military could not find the second, larger vessel.<<

As Mr buffy commented yesterday when we heard this on the radio…so…can find a little boat but not a big boat?!

It was probably painted blue, so it didn’t stand out.

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

>>Instead, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who was overseeing Special Operations on that day, told Congress that the intelligence he received said the boat was on its way to meet a larger vessel bound for Suriname, a small South American country to the east of Venezuela, to transfer drugs to it. Bradley told the lawmakers that the military could not find the second, larger vessel.<<

As Mr buffy commented yesterday when we heard this on the radio…so…can find a little boat but not a big boat?!

It was probably painted blue, so it didn’t stand out.

So, blue paint defeats the radar? Wonder how much to paint my car blue…

furious said:

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

>>Instead, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who was overseeing Special Operations on that day, told Congress that the intelligence he received said the boat was on its way to meet a larger vessel bound for Suriname, a small South American country to the east of Venezuela, to transfer drugs to it. Bradley told the lawmakers that the military could not find the second, larger vessel.<<

As Mr buffy commented yesterday when we heard this on the radio…so…can find a little boat but not a big boat?!

It was probably painted blue, so it didn’t stand out.

So, blue paint defeats the radar? Wonder how much to paint my car blue…

Uhhh…the radar…umm…the radar was… it wasn’t working because we forgot to renew the software subscription. Yeah, that’s it, it wasn’t working!

captain_spalding said:

furious said:

captain_spalding said:

It was probably painted blue, so it didn’t stand out.

So, blue paint defeats the radar? Wonder how much to paint my car blue…

Uhhh…the radar…umm…the radar was… it wasn’t working because we forgot to renew the software subscription. Yeah, that’s it, it wasn’t working!

It’s been outsourced to Trump World Communications Group.

December 8, 2025 (Monday)

Last Wednesday, December 3, a reporter asked President Donald J. Trump if he would release the video of the September 2 strike on a small boat off the coast of Venezuela that killed two survivors of a previous strike that had split their boat, capsized it, and set it on fire. He answered: “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.”

Today, just five days later, a reporter began to ask Trump a question, beginning with the words: “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth announced that….” Trump interrupted her. “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that.” Turning slightly to make a side comment to someone else, he said: “This is ABC fake news.”

As G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers estimates that 56.1% of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president while only 39.7% approve, and as his agenda appears more unpopular by the day, Trump and his loyalists appear to be trying to cement his power over the United States of America.

On Sunday, Trump appeared to pressure the Supreme Court to let his tariffs stand, despite the fact that the Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to regulate tariffs. Trump’s justification for seizing the power to impose them is the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permits a president to regulate financial transactions after declaring a national emergency. Trump declared a national economic emergency in April before launching his tariff war.

Observers expect the Supreme Court to hand down a decision about the constitutionality of Trump’s tariffs later this week, and the justices’ questioning during oral arguments suggests they are not inclined to accept Trump’s assumption of such dramatic economic power over the U.S.

Last night, on social media, Trump tried to position tariffs as central to national security, an area where the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court have tended to uphold the president’s authority. He posted, “While the United States has other methods of charging TARIFFS against foreign countries, many of whom have, for YEARS, TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF OUR NATION, the current method of Tariffing before the United States Supreme Court is far more DIRECT, LESS CUMBERSOME, and MUCH FASTER, all ingredients necessary for A STRONG AND DECISIVE NATIONAL SECURITY RESULT. SPEED, POWER, AND CERTAINTY ARE, AT ALL TIMES, IMPORTANT FACTORS IN GETTING THE JOB DONE IN A LASTING AND VICTORIOUS MANNER.”

Trump continued: “I have settled 8 Wars in 10 months because of the rights clearly given to the President of the United States. If countries didn’t think these rights existed, they would have said so, LOUD AND CLEAR! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Last Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC’s Squawk Box that the administration believes it can continue its tariff agenda using different laws even if the Supreme Court strikes down its current policy.

Trump’s tariffs have hit farmers particularly hard, making imported goods like machinery and fertilizer more expensive while destroying the markets for products like corn, soybeans, and wheat to create what economists estimate could be losses of $44 billion in net cash income for farmers from their 2025–2026 crops.

Today Trump announced the administration intends to give farmers one-time payments totaling $12 billion. At an event at the White House, Trump told reporters: “e love our farmers. And as you know, the farmers like me, because, you know, based on, based on voting trends, you could call it voting trends or anything else, but they’re great people.”

Utah County Democratic Party chair Darin Self commented: “The President of the United States unilaterally levied a tax on all of us and is redistributing our taxes to a core segment of his supporters.” “A bailout is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” corn and soybean farmer John Bartman said on a press call for the Democratic National Committee in mid-October. “Government bailouts do not make up for our loss of income. We don’t want a bailout. We want markets for our crops. We want to be able to work hard every year and enjoy the fruits of our labor and know that we did it on our own.”

Administration officials are calling the program the “Farm Bridge Assistance” program, saying it is designed to help farmers until Trump’s economic policies become successful, a promise Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins echoed later in the day when she told Larry Kudlow of the Fox News Channel: “The relief is coming…. It really is a golden age just right around the corner.”

But Trump spent $28 billion bailing out farmers during his first term, during his first trade war with China, without creating a “golden age,” and Matt Grossman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the administration has announced it will not publish an already-delayed October report on wholesale-price inflation, saying it will roll those figures into another delayed report due in November and release them in mid-January. It’s probably safe to assume those numbers will not tell a story the administration likes.

The right-wing justices on the Supreme Court might refuse to support Trump’s bid to take control of the country’s economic system, but in arguments today they appeared poised to give him the power to take control of the modern American government by stacking the independent agencies that do much of the government’s work with officials loyal to him.

In March, Trump fired the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. Since 1935, the Supreme Court has said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Although Trump himself initially appointed Slaughter, he claimed he fired her because her continued service on the independent commission was “inconsistent with Administration’s priorities” and that he had the right to do so under the authority granted to him by Article II of the Constitution despite the fact Congress set up the position in such a way that it would be shielded from presidential politics.

This argument is an attempt to establish the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory the right wing has pushed since the 1980s, when it began to distrust the will of voters as they expressed it through Congress, and thus tried to find ways to assert the power of the president and reduce the power of Congress.

The theory of the unitary executive says that since the president is the head of one of the three independent branches of government—those are the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch—he has sole authority over the executive branch and cannot be reined in by the other two branches. Trump has leaned into this idea since 2019, when he told attendees at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit being held in Washington, D.C.: “I have an Article II, where I have…the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The Supreme Court’s 2014 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision supported Trump’s radical reading of the powers of the president when it took the radical position that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of official presidential duties. In his second term, Trump has worked to fit his power grabs within the contours of that decision. Now the Supreme Court appears primed to hand him another win by finding the president has complete control over the officers in the executive branch, including the independent agencies established by Congress but which Congress has been placing in the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington.

Representing the government, Solicitor General John Sauer told the court that the president must be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that this political destruction of the independent agencies Congress had established to provide nonpartisan expertise on issues like how to regulate pollutants would hurt the country. “aving a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” she said.

Law professor Deborah Pearlstein wrote: “It is really, really hard to get your head around the raw hubris of the majority. They really will be destabilizing the operating structure of the entire U.S. government. Why? Because they believe they have a better idea about how the past century should’ve been done.”
The court should decide the case in June.

But there are signs that Republican lawmakers are joining the Democrats to push back against Trump’s quest for power. CNN’s Natasha Bertrand reports that tomorrow, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, will brief the Gang of Eight, presumably on the military strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, especially the strike of September 2. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders from both parties in both chambers of Congress, and the chair and ranking member of each chamber’s intelligence committees.

Bertrand also reports that the head of U.S. Southern Command Admiral Alvin Holsey, who will retire two years ahead of schedule on December 12 after disagreements with Hegseth over the strikes, will meet virtually with members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees.

Lawmakers will be voting this week on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that lays out priorities and funding authorization for the Defense Department, funding that is then appropriated in different legislation. When the lawmakers released their final version of the bill on Sunday, they had put into it a measure to withhold 25% of Hegseth’s travel budget until the Defense Department hands over the “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations in the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command” to the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

Neophyte said:

December 8, 2025 (Monday)

……

Lawmakers will be voting this week on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that lays out priorities and funding authorization for the Defense Department, funding that is then appropriated in different legislation. When the lawmakers released their final version of the bill on Sunday, they had put into it a measure to withhold 25% of Hegseth’s travel budget until the Defense Department hands over the “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations in the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command” to the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

Thanks.

Thanks.

December 9, 2025 (Tuesday)

When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”

“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”

But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.

Trump has always been a salesman with an instinctive understanding of the power of media. That sense helped him to rise to power in 2016 by leveraging an image Republicans had embraced since the 1980s: that the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.

When he got his disheartening fact-check from ChatGPT, Morris was preparing an article, published today, exploring “how cable news fueled the culture war and broke U.S. politics.” The article notes that most people care about and interact with the government through economic or affordability issues—prices, jobs, health care, social programs, and taxes—and that most laws are also about these issues. But, he points out, political rhetoric overwhelmingly focuses on issues like race, crime, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and guns: the so-called culture war.

Morris highlights a new academic paper by Shakked Noy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aakaash Rao of Harvard that links America’s culture war to changes in the media in the 1980s. Their research shows that “a distinctive business strategy” in cable news led it to emphasize culture over economic issues. Noy and Rao found that cable emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.”

“In other words,” Morris writes, “when cable news producers decide to cover an issue more, voters subsequently say it is more important to them, and that issue is more predictive of how they’ll vote. TV news coverage, and cable in particular, has the power to choose which issues are most ‘salient’ for upcoming elections.” He notes that “this effect is almost entirely, or maybe even entirely, driven by Fox News,” and that right-wing politicians benefit most from it. Democrats get their highest marks from voters on issues not covered by cable news.

Morris concludes that “more than the Republicans or Democrats, left or right, it’s the companies that abuse our attention for profit that are the real winners of American politics.”

This conclusion echoes a 2006 conversation a reporter for Financial Times held with Fox News Channel founder Rupert Murdoch and chief executive officer Roger Ailes. In that conversation, when asked if running the Fox News Channel was “like running a political campaign,” Ailes responded: “No more than running a Dairy Queen. You have a customer, you have to market it to help them get to your product, the product has to be good, you can’t drop too many on the floor or in the sprinkles or you’ll lose money. All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.”

Ailes came to the Fox News Channel from his work packaging presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. One Nixon media advisor explained how they could put their candidate over the top by transforming him into a media celebrity. “Voters are basically lazy,” the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

Ailes presented Nixon in carefully curated televised “town halls” geared to different audiences, in which he arranged the set, Nixon’s answers to carefully staged questions, Nixon’s makeup, and the crowd’s applause. “Let’s face it,” he said, “a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But, carefully managed, television could “make them forget all that.”

Ailes found his stride working for right-wing candidates, selling the narrative that Democrats were socialists who wanted to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities and women. He produced the racist “Willie Horton” ad for Republican candidate George H.W. Bush in 1988, and a short-lived television show hosted by right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh in 1992. It was from there that he went on to shape the Fox News Channel after its launch in 1996.

Ailes sold his narrative with what he called the “orchestra pit theory.” He explained: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

This is a theory Trump has always embraced, and one that drives his second term in office. He has placed television personalities throughout his administration—to the apparent disbelief of ChatGPT—and has turned the White House into, as media ally Steve Bannon put it, a “major information content provider.” What Trump does “is the action, and we just happen to be one of the distributors,” Bannon told Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. The administration has replaced traditional media outlets with right-wing loyalists and floods the social media space with a Trump narrative that is untethered from reality. Communications director Steven Cheung says their goal is to create “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump’s repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country’s problems are due to Democrats, minorities, and women.

Since voters in November elections turned against the Republicans, citing their concerns about the economy, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the idea of “affordability” is a “Democrat con job.” In an interview yesterday with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he would grade his economy “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” Any problems with it, he and his loyalists say, stem from former president Joe Biden’s having left them an economy in shambles. But in fact, in October 2024, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.”

As news cycles have turned against his administration on the economy—as well as the Epstein files, immigration sweeps, strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and his mental acuity—Trump has tried to regain control of the narrative by diving into the orchestra pit. He has turned to an extreme version of the racism, sexism, and attacks on Americans who use the social safety net that have been part of Republican rhetoric for decades. He has gone out of his way to attack Somali Americans as “garbage,” to attack female reporters, and to use an ableist slur against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose son has a nonverbal learning disability, prompting imitators to drive by the Walz home shouting the slur.

The fight to control the media narrative is on display this week in a fight over a media merger. As Josh Marshall explained in Talking Points Memo yesterday, the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to be called Time Warner and includes news division CNN, had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. But, as the deal was moving forward, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover to get Warner Bros. Discovery for itself.

David Ellison, son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, who co-founded software giant Oracle, bought Paramount over the summer and appears to be creating a right-wing media ecosystem dominated by the Trumps. Part of the financing for his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery would come from the investment company of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as from Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Paramount told Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders they should accept its offer because Trump would never allow the Netflix deal to happen, and as Marshall notes, Trump appeared yesterday to agree with that suggestion.

The Paramount merger gave Ellison control of CBS, which promptly turned rightward. At stake now is CNN, which Netflix doesn’t particularly want but Paramount does, either to neuter it or turn it into another version of Fox News. Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told Trump he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that “Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”

During the Gilded Age, a similar moment of media consolidation around right-wing politics, a magazine that celebrated ordinary Americans launched a new form of journalism. S.S. McClure, a former coffee pot salesman in the Midwest, recognized that people in small towns and on farms were interested in the same questions of reform as people in the cities. He and a partner started McClure’s Magazine in 1893 and in 1903 published a famous issue that contained Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens’s exposé of the corruption of the Minneapolis municipal government, and Ray Stannard Baker’s exposé of workers’ violence during a coal strike.

Their carefully detailed studies of the machinations of a single trust, a single city, and a single union personalized the larger struggles of people in the new industrial economy. Their stories electrified readers and galvanized a movement to reform the government that had bred such abuses. McClure wrote that all three articles might have been titled “The American Contempt of Law.” It was the public that paid for such lawlessness, he wrote, and it was high time the public demanded that justice be enforced.

“Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it?” McClure asked. “The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some ‘error’ or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand.”

“There is no one left,” McClure wrote, “none but all of us.”

December 10, 2025 (Wednesday)

Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-seven years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans. In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.

The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved countries around the globe.

Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.

President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.

“he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.

The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”

Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”

The thirty articles that followed established that “ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”

Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, attacks upon…honour and reputation.”

They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.

They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”

They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”

They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond control.”

They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”

They included the right to participate in art and science.

They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”

Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.

Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.

Indeed, today is the forty-first anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.

The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.

Last year, under President Joe Biden, the White House celebrated Human Rights Day by recommitting to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” The State Department bestowed the Human Rights Defender Award on eight individuals who have defended migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, and democracy. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan.
The U.S. government did not recognize Human Rights Day this year.
Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”

The official did not tell Pamuk which of the administration’s actions its officials think the ICC would investigate, but said there was “open chatter” that the court might target administration officials. On social media, opponents of the administration have begun to refer to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as “Hagueseth,” after The Hague, Netherlands, where the ICC holds its official meetings.

Legal analysts have expressed grave concern that the administration’s attacks on small boats in the Caribbean are unlawful, and many have called a September 2 strike that killed shipwrecked survivors from a previous strike either murder or a war crime.

Yesterday, Damien Cave, Edward Wong, and Maria Abi-Habib of the New York Times reported that lawyers for the Pentagon proposed sending two survivors from an October strike against a small boat in the Caribbean to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador, where prisoners previously rendered there reported widespread torture and abuse. Defense Department officials were keen to make sure survivors didn’t end up in a U.S. court where the administration’s insistence that the men were an immediate danger to the U.S. because they were trafficking drugs would come under legal scrutiny.

Shocked, lawyers for the State Department refused, and the two men were sent back to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador.

“ The U.S. government did not recognize Human Rights Day this year”

Everything you need to know about America is in this sentence.

Divine Angel said:

“ The U.S. government did not recognize Human Rights Day this year”

Everything you need to know about America is in this sentence.

FMD

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

Sanctions? How?

buffy said:

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

Sanctions? How?

They’ll refuse to allow them to come to New York to do their Xmas shopping.

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

One thing about Trump and his clowns, they move fast.

After less than a year in what we can only frame in derisive terms as ‘government’, they’re at the same stage of trepidation about future consequences as it took the Nazis nearly five years of widespread war ro achieve.

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

Sanctions? How?

They’ll refuse to allow them to come to New York to do their Xmas shopping.

Or they could force them to come to New York for their Xmas Shopping. To spend too much…

Michael V said:

captain_spalding said:

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

Sanctions? How?

They’ll refuse to allow them to come to New York to do their Xmas shopping.

One thing about Trump and his clowns, they move fast.

After less than a year in what we can only frame in derisive terms as ‘government’, they’re at the same stage of trepidation about future consequences as it took the Nazis nearly five years of widespread war ro achieve.

Or they could force them to come to New York for their Xmas Shopping. To spend too much…

we love how the jokers for the past 25 years were insisting that these great freedom countries like the USSA were the upholders of the rules based international order while shitting on the other countries that were actually playing by the rules based international order and keeping it running

buffy said:

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

Sanctions? How?

I’m not a politician, and don’t play one on TV, but it seems to me that the best way to avoid being investigated by the ICC is to not break any international laws. But what would I know?

btm said:

buffy said:

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

Sanctions? How?

I’m not a politician, and don’t play one on TV, but it seems to me that the best way to avoid being investigated by the ICC is to not break any international laws. But what would I know?

Because it cramps your style for travelling if pretty much anywhere you land the police will be waiting to arrest you on an international warrant…

buffy said:

btm said:

buffy said:

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

Sanctions? How?

I’m not a politician, and don’t play one on TV, but it seems to me that the best way to avoid being investigated by the ICC is to not break any international laws. But what would I know?

Because it cramps your style for travelling if pretty much anywhere you land the police will be waiting to arrest you on an international warrant…

Didn’t Putin make it to India the other day?

Michael V said:

buffy said:

btm said:

I’m not a politician, and don’t play one on TV, but it seems to me that the best way to avoid being investigated by the ICC is to not break any international laws. But what would I know?

Because it cramps your style for travelling if pretty much anywhere you land the police will be waiting to arrest you on an international warrant…

Didn’t Putin make it to India the other day?

well you know India are the good guys they follow rules and look after human rights and all that

Neophyte said:

December 10, 2025 (Wednesday)

Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-seven years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
………………………………………………

Thanks for posting. An excellent read. (As usual.)

:)

buffy said:

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

Sanctions? How?

They already have sanctions on various UN figures, such as

https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2025/08/us-sanctions-special-rapporteur-francesca-albanese-threaten-human-rights-system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Albanese

Sanctions by the U.S.
In July 2025 the United States Department of the Treasury under the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Albanese under Executive Order 14203 naming her a “specially designated national”, thus forbidding all U.S. persons and companies from doing business with her, except as necessary to the wind down of any transaction involving Albanese until 8 August 2025. The U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was quoted saying in this regard: “Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated.”

Albanese called the sanctions “obscene” and said that she was being punished for her “pursuit of justice”. The move was criticized by Amnesty International as a “disgraceful affront to international justice”. The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal praised the move as overdue.

—-

The sanctions have inhibited her ability to receive international payments, means her credit cards have been cut off, and that she can’t access assets in the US, let alone travel to the US, where much of her work is based and where her daughter lives.

dv said:

buffy said:

>>Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern…that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”<<

Sanctions? How?

They already have sanctions on various UN figures, such as

https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2025/08/us-sanctions-special-rapporteur-francesca-albanese-threaten-human-rights-system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Albanese

Sanctions by the U.S.
In July 2025 the United States Department of the Treasury under the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Albanese under Executive Order 14203 naming her a “specially designated national”, thus forbidding all U.S. persons and companies from doing business with her, except as necessary to the wind down of any transaction involving Albanese until 8 August 2025. The U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was quoted saying in this regard: “Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated.”

Albanese called the sanctions “obscene” and said that she was being punished for her “pursuit of justice”. The move was criticized by Amnesty International as a “disgraceful affront to international justice”. The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal praised the move as overdue.

—-

The sanctions have inhibited her ability to receive international payments, means her credit cards have been cut off, and that she can’t access assets in the US, let alone travel to the US, where much of her work is based and where her daughter lives.

Bloody ‘eck!

December 11, 2025 (Thursday)

On Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump kicked off his nationwide tour to assure Americans that the Republicans are focused on bringing down costs. Voters turned to Trump in 2024 in large part because he promised that his understanding of the economy would enable him to bring down the prices that had risen in the global inflation spike after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world economy.

Within weeks of the election, Trump began to back off on that promise, telling a reporter for Time magazine in December 2024 that “it’s very hard” to bring down prices. Then in April he launched a tariff war that began to raise prices, while his on-again, off-again tariff rates discouraged businesses from investing while they waited to see what made economic sense.

Americans are not impressed with Trump’s handling of the economy. A poll by AP/NORC, which stands for Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago—a very reputable polling collaboration—released today shows that only 31% of American adults approve of Trump’s management of the economy, with 67% disapproving. Among Independents, that number breaks down to 15% approving and 80% disapproving.

Trump’s overall numbers are not much better. Just 36% of American adults approve of his job performance, with 61% disapproving. Among Independents, just 20% approve, while 74% disapprove. With them, he is underwater by an astonishing 54 points.

So Trump’s advisors have sent him off on a tour to convince Americans the administration shares their concerns about the economy.

On Tuesday, in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Trump addressed the question of affordability by telling the crowd, “You’re doing better than you’ve ever done.” He blamed higher prices on former president Joe Biden, confirming the observation of CNN’s Stephen Collinson that Trump’s answer for everything is to blame Biden.

Trump defended the tariffs that have raised prices by suggesting that the tariffs are protecting major items and that if people are feeling the pinch of higher prices, they “can give up certain products. You could give up pencils. That’s under the China policy, you know, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two, you know, they don’t need that many. But you always need, you always need steel. You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. But you don’t need 37 dolls. So, we’re doing things right.”

Otherwise, Trump delivered his usual rally speech. Rambling for more than an hour and a half, he attacked immigrants and confirmed that in 2018 he did, in fact, call Haiti and African nations “sh*thole countries.” He attacked the board of the Federal Reserve and, while boasting of his administration’s strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, said: “And now we’re going to do land, because the land is much easier.” Anthony Zurcher of the BBC noted that Trump told the crowd his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, had told him to focus on the economy but boasted: “I haven’t read practically anything off the stupid teleprompter.”

After the speech, at 9:00 on Tuesday night, Trump’s social media account posted:

“There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me! My hours are the longest, and my results are among the best. I’ve stopped Eight Wars, saving many millions of lives in the process, created the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country, brought Business back into the United States at levels never seen before, rebuilt our Military, created the Largest Tax Cuts and Regulation Cuts, EVER, closed our open and very dangerous Southern Border, when previous Administrations were unable to do so, and created an ‘aura’ around the United States of America that has led every Country in the World to respect us more than ever before. In addition to all of that, I go out of my way to do long, thorough, and very boring Medical Examinations at the Great Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, seen and supervised by top doctors, all of whom have given me PERFECT Marks—Some have even said they have never seen such Strong Results. I do these Tests because I owe it to our Country. In addition to the Medical, I have done something that no other President has done, on three separate occasions, the last one being recently, by taking what is known as a Cognitive Examination, something which few people would be able to do very well, including those working at The New York Times, and I ACED all three of them in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know. I have been told that few people have been able to ‘ace’ this Examination and, in fact, most do very poorly, which is why many other Presidents have decided not to take it at all. Despite all of this, the time and work involved, The New York Times, and some others, like to pretend that I am ‘slowing up,’ am maybe not as sharp as I once was, or am in poor physical health, knowing that it is not true, and knowing that I work very hard, probably harder than I have ever worked before. I will know when I am ‘slowing up,’ but it’s not now! After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean ‘THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.’ They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it. They have inaccurately reported on all of my Election Results and, in fact, were forced to apologize on much of what they wrote. The best thing that could happen to this Country would be if The New York Times would cease publication because they are a horrible, biased, and untruthful ‘source’ of information. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Trump’s performance seems unlikely to reassure Americans that he is prioritizing their economic concerns.

Congressional Republicans are not helping. The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—did not extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance bought on the Affordable Care Act market that subsidizes that insurance. Today, Senate Republicans voted against the Democrats’ measure to extend the premium tax credits for three years. The vote was 51–48, nine votes short of the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster. Only four Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska—voted yes.

Senate Democrats, joined by Rand Paul (R-KY), then voted against a Republican bill that would have let the credits expire but would have given adults who earn less than 700% of the federal poverty line access to $1,000 annually to put toward healthcare costs if they are under 50, and $1,500 a year if they are between 50 and 65, if they are on lower-cost ACA plans with an annual deductible of $7,500. The money could not be used for abortion or “gender transition procedures” and would require verification of immigration and citizenship status.

In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has rejected the idea of extending the premium tax credits but is facing a revolt from some members of his conference who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want to see the credits extended. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) has launched a discharge petition to force Johnson to bring a bill to extend the credits to a vote. The measure would only pass with Democratic votes, making Johnson and other Republican leaders scramble to create their own plan. Ever since the Affordable Care Act became law fifteen years ago, a Republican alternative has remained elusive.

Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan, and Laura Weiss of Punchbowl News reported today that Johnson has said he will keep the fight over healthcare going into next year. They note that no Republican “thinks it’s a good idea for the to be talking about health care—their worst issue—during an election year.”

Democrats are likely to emphasize that the cost for extending the ACA premium tax credits—which benefit everyday Americans and which the Republicans did not extend in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act—would be about $350 billion over ten years. The cost for extending the 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy and corporations and which they did extend, will be more than $4 trillion over the same time period.

The Punchbowl reporters note that Republican confusion over healthcare is just one more sign of trouble for Republicans in the House. “e won’t say that the House is in total chaos,” they wrote this morning. “Total chaos is when members unleash censure resolutions against each other or a trio of House Republicans publicly claim Speaker Mike Johnson has no business running the chamber. That was last week.” They note that fear of Trump kept Republicans in line earlier in the year, but with Trump’s numbers falling and voters turning to Democrats, Republicans are either planning to leave the House or protecting their own political prospects.

Concerned about control of Congress after 2026, Trump and members of his administration are pressuring state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts in order to favor Republicans. In Indiana, Republican state senators have resisted their pressure, along with death threats, to pass a map that would give Republicans two districts currently dominated by Democrats, giving Republicans the entire congressional delegation.

Vice President J.D. Vance and Don Trump Jr. have jumped into the struggle, and today the lobbying arm of the right-wing Heritage Institute, Heritage Action, posted on social media that “President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.” Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith confirmed that “he Trump admin was VERY clear about this.”

Political observer John Collins commented: “Nothing shows confidence like threatening your own party.” Another Hoosier seemed unconcerned with the threat that Trump would illegally withhold federal funding, posting: “We know how to roll with potholes better than any other state,” with a laughing emoji.

This evening, the Indiana senate rejected the new gerrymandered congressional map by a vote of 31 to 19. The vote wasn’t close: Twenty-one Republicans—that is, a majority of the Republican senators—joined the 10 Democratic senators in voting no.

This evening, Megan Messerly and Myah Ward of Politico reported that the White House is looking to send surrogates like Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the road instead of Trump to carry the message of affordability to the American people, leaving Trump to focus on “motivating his die-hard supporter who might not otherwise vote when he isn’t on the ballot.”

“So Trump’s advisors have sent him off on a tour to convince Americans the administration shares their concerns about the economy.”

This’ll go well. Can’t wait for the off-topic rambling that will accompany these appearances.

““There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me!” etc

That whole paragraph reads like a toddler trying to convince mummy why they shouldn’t go to bed.

December 12, 2025 (Friday)

Today former Alabama senator Doug Jones launched his campaign to become the state’s next governor. He announced on November 24 that he would enter the race, but said in a speech tonight that he chose today for the official launch because the date marks exactly eight years since he won a 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate. In that election, voters tapped Jones, a Democrat, to fill the seat formerly held by Republican Jeff Sessions, who left the seat empty when he went to Washington, D.C., to be President Donald J. Trump’s first attorney general.

Jones’s election was an “earthquake,” Daniel Strauss of Politico reported at the time. For the first time in 25 years, the Senate seat Jones had won would go to a Democrat in what Strauss called “a huge political setback” to Trump. After he won, Jones told his supporters: “At the end of the day, this entire race has been about dignity and respect. This campaign has been about the rule of law. This campaign has been about common courtesy and decency.”

If Jones wins the Democratic primary for governor, he will likely face off for the governorship against current Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach who beat Jones to win the Senate seat in 2020 after then-president Trump strongly backed him. During the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the certified electoral votes that would make Democratic candidate Joe Biden president, both Trump and his then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani called Tuberville to get him to delay the counting of the votes.

Tuberville has remained a staunch Trump ally, embracing the increasing MAGA emphasis on protecting “western culture,” insisting that undocumented immigrants are, as Representative Michael Rulli (R-OH), said today, “terrorizing our people,” “killing our children,” “raping our women, just like they do in England,” and “destroying western culture.” That language is at the heart of the administration’s recent National Security Strategy, which advanced the idea that the U.S. and Europe must protect a white, Christian, “Western identity.” This week, Tuberville echoed it when he claimed that Alabama’s Muslims embrace an “ideology…incompatible with our Western values.”

The MAGA claim that white Christians in the United States and Europe are engaged in an existential fight to protect their superior race from being overwhelmed by inferior racial stocks has roots in the U.S. that reach all the way back to the fears of white southerners in the 1850s that if human enslavement could not spread to the West, the growing population of Black Americans in the South would overwhelm them, probably with violence.

The theory that race defined history got its major “scientific” examination in the U.S. in 1916 with a book by lawyer Madison Grant titled The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History. Grant’s book drew from similar European works to argue that the “Nordic race,” from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted for the best of human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by immigrants from “inferior” white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and corruption. To strengthen the Nordic race, Grant advocated, on the one hand, for an end to immigration and for “selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit” through sterilization, and on the other hand, “fforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes.”

Grant’s ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws as well as the 1924 Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after Germany’s Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant’s book in his speeches and wrote to Grant describing the book as “my bible.”
In this era it is easy to see the strand of American history that informs the worldview of someone like Tommy Tuberville. But Jones has also inherited a strand of American history.

In his speech tonight, the former senator talked about the economic concerns of people in Alabama, noting the administration’s $40 billion support for Argentina’s president Javier Milei while American farmers lose markets, the loss of access to healthcare, the skyrocketing cost of energy, and the inability of young people to find a job that pays the bills.

But he also talked about history. He talked about his earlier election, when Alabama proved it could transcend partisan labels and stand up for the values that made Alabama great. Jones rejected the administration’s “attacks on democracy, on freedom of speech and freedom of religion; attacks on minorities and the media, attacks on the rule of law where political adversaries are targeted and political cronies are pardoned; proven science is cast aside, placing our health at risk; policies and executive orders that only benefit the tech bros and billionaires while working folks struggle to make ends meet, farmers are losing their markets and forced to take handouts to survive….”

Instead, Jones called for reinforcing Alabama values of “hard work,” “fairness,” “looking out for your neighbor, even when you don’t agree on everything,” “telling the truth—even when we don’t want to hear it,” and believing “that every person deserves dignity, respect, opportunity, and a voice.” “Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values,” he said. “They’re Alabama values.”

Jones’s campaign launch today built on his 2017 senatorial win, but his career reaches back from that. Jones is perhaps best known for his successful prosecution of two Ku Klux Klan members for their participation in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four young girls. The local Ku Klux Klan had not been able to stomach the organization of the Birmingham community for Black rights and had responded by bombing the church that was the heart of community organizing. President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997, and Jones’s support for charges against church bombers Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry brought a jury to a guilty verdict after the two men had walked away from accountability for their actions for almost 60 years.

Jones came to be in the position of U.S. attorney that would enable him to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had killed four children after law school because as a second-year student in 1977 he had watched former Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley prosecute Robert Chambliss for his participation in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

Jones had skipped class to be present at that trial because, in a chance encounter, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had encouraged him to go to courthouse trials to see good lawyers in action. Jones took Douglas at his word and watched as Baxley brought the first of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombers to justice. “It had a profound effect on me,” Jones later recalled. “Not only did I witness a great trial lawyer and learn from him, I also witnessed justice and what it means to be a public servant.”

The encounter between Justice Douglas and Jones came about because Douglas had been invited to speak at the University of Alabama Law School, where Jones was a student, in 1974 on the twentieth anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in the public schools to be unconstitutional.

Justice Douglas was a member of the Supreme Court when it issued its unanimous Brown v. Board decision overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In 1896, the court had said segregation was constitutional so long as the facilities provided to Black people were equal to those provided to white people. The Brown decision exposed “separate but equal” as a lie. It concluded that “eparate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and thereby launched the modern era of desegregation.

Douglas worked to protect Americans’ civil liberties from a powerful government. He once told New York Times court reporter Alden Whitman that he had gone into the law after working summers as a migrant farmhand. “I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the I W W who I saw being shot at by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law.”

Douglas took his seat on the Supreme Court in 1939 following the retirement of Justice Louis Brandeis, who had personally recommended to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Douglas should take his place. The first Jewish justice, Brandeis had taken his own seat on the court in 1916—the same year Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race—and, with the help of his sister-in-law Josephine Goldmark, pioneered the concept of basing the law on the actual conditions of life in the United States rather than on previous legal opinions. On the bench, Brandeis was a crusader for social justice against the nation’s established powers.

Brandeis was the son of immigrants from Prague who were abolitionists, opposing the American institution of enslavement. His uncle was a delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president.

Progressivism is as deeply rooted in American history as reaction.

In his speech tonight, Jones noted that Alabama politicians “love to say they are running to protect our values” and encouraged voters to make it clear to elected officials what those values are. He urged people in Alabama to rise above the current political divisions and build a government not for the powerful, but— as Lincoln said— a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

“On that election day in 2017 we gave the people, not just in Alabama but across this country, something even more significant,” Jones said. “We gave them hope for a stronger democracy. And today, eight years later, we’re rekindling that hope, that optimism, that enthusiasm. Let’s face it,” he added, “there is a greater urgency for hope today than there was in 2017.”

December 13, 2025 (Saturday)

We haven’t taken a night off in ages, and I’ll bet you’re as tired as I am.

Let’s do it, and regroup tomorrow.

Neophyte said:

December 13, 2025 (Saturday)

We haven’t taken a night off in ages, and I’ll bet you’re as tired as I am.

Let’s do it, and regroup tomorrow.

:)

December 14, 2025 (Sunday)

Last Sunday, on December 7, Mydelle Wright, a well-regarded preservationist, filed a declaration before a court, saying that President Donald J. Trump is trying to get around the law to bulldoze four historic federal buildings. The four are the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, named for the first Black Cabinet member, completed in 1968 and on the National Register of Historic Places as a building worthy of preservation for its historical significance or artistic value; the New Deal–era General Services Administration (GSA) Regional Office Building; the 1919 Liberty Loan Building, which is the last of the World War I era “tempos” erected as the city grew to accommodate a changing government; and the 1940 Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, full of priceless murals that date from its start as the home of the Social Security Board, the precursor to the Social Security Administration.

Now retired, Wright spent 20 years working for the GSA, the agency that oversees federal buildings. She said she had heard and believed that the White House was circumventing the GSA and its legal procedures to solicit bids to recommend the four buildings for demolition. By law, GSA has sole authority over this process; nonetheless, she said, “key GSA personnel have only just learned of the White House’s activities.”

White House lawyers told the court that Wright’s declaration was “impermissible and factually inaccurate.” But the buildings are in styles popular in the twentieth century, ones Trump denigrated in an August executive order when he called for public buildings to be built in a style of classical architecture based on that of ancient Athens and Rome.

Wright’s declaration came as part of a lawsuit launched in November by the DC Preservation League and the law firm Cultural Heritage Partners after Trump told Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham he was planning to repaint the grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building—a National Historic Landmark built in 1888—white. The proposed change had undergone none of the required expert consultation, public input, or consideration of potential damage.

By suing over potential damage to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building before the president could damage it, the plaintiffs seek to prevent the sort of damage Trump inflicted on the White House when he bulldozed the East Wing in October without any of the required reviews, environmental studies, public input, or congressional approval.

In 1949, Congress chartered the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation to “facilitate public participation in the preservation of sites, buildings, and objects of national significance or interest.” On Friday, December 12, the trust sued to stop Trump from building his proposed 90,000-square-foot addition to the White House. It noted that he had torn down the East Wing without securing any of the legal approvals he needed and that the White House greeted public concerns about the demolition by issuing a press release claiming that “‘unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies’ were ‘manufactur outrage’ and ‘clutching their pearls’ over President Trump’s ‘visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House.’”

The White House has expressed its opinion that the president does not have to have permits or permission to tear down buildings, only to put them up. But now, without permissions, it appears to have begun construction on the ballroom, despite the fact that the first architect Trump initially picked for the project has stepped aside.

“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever—not President Trump, not President Joe Biden, and not anyone else,” the lawsuit says. “And no president is legally allowed to construct a ballroom on public property without giving the public the opportunity to weigh in.”

It turns out that Trump arranged for the dirt from the demolition of the East Wing to be dumped on the East Potomac Golf Links, one of three public golf courses in the Washington, D.C., area Trump is hoping to renovate after pushing aside the nonprofit group that holds a 50-year lease to restore and operate the courses and keep them affordable. All three of the courses—East Potomac, Rock Creek Park Golf, and Langston Golf Course—are on the National Register of Historic Places. Trump says if he takes control of them, D.C. residents will pay a lower fee to use them than golfers from outside the area.

In an interview on Friday with Meridith McGraw of the Wall Street Journal about the economy, Trump took repeated calls from friends and allies, including one from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who, McGraw wrote, “joined by speakerphone to discuss the administration’s plans for Washington, D.C. golf courses.”

Today Trump told reporters that chief of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Vince Haley, has “a policy thing that’s going to be unbelievable happening…. We’re building an arc like the Arc de Triumph,” he said, mixing English and French, “and we’re building it by the Arlington Bridge, the Arlington Cemetery, opposite the Lincoln Memorial. You could say, Jefferson, Washington, everything, ‘cause they’re all right there, and it’s something that is so special. It will be like the one in Paris, but to be honest with you, it blows it away, blows it away in every way.”

In The Guardian last week, Judith Levine noted that Trump is erasing the face of a federal government that served the American people, replacing it with his own.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the looming loss of the Cohen building, with its murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and Seymour Fogel. On December 10, Timothy Noah, who has been following this story, posted images of those murals in Backbencher. They were designed to showcase the 1935 Social Security Act that established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The Shahn murals show the evils of a world of economic insecurity, showing “endless waiting, men standing and waiting, men sitting and waiting, the man and boy going wearily into the long empty perspective of a railroad track.” He showed the “little girl of the mills” and “breaker boys working in a mine. The crippled boy issuing from the mine symbolizes the perils of child labor…a homeless boy is seen sleeping in the street; another child leans from a tenement window.” He showed “the insecurity of dependents—the aged and infirm woman, the helpless mother with her small child.”

Shahn illustrated the alleviation of that insecurity through government action. He showed “the building of homes… tremendous public works, furnishing employment and benefitting all of society…youths of a slum area engaged in healthy sport in handball courts…the Harvest— threshing and fruit-gathering, obvious symbols of security, suggesting also security as it applies to the farm family.”

Now the government is focusing not on protecting everyday Americans, but on protecting those in the “Epstein class.” On Friday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released 89 of the more than 95,000 photos it received from the Epstein estate. Those include images of right-wing Trump media ally Steve Bannon in a relaxed selfie with Epstein, Bannon talking with Epstein across a desk that has a framed photo of what appears to be an unconscious woman, Trump surrounded by young women, and a picture of “Trump condoms,” priced at $4.50. They feature the president’s face as an older man and bear the caption “I’m HUUUUGE!”

These images are not part of the FBI Epstein investigation files, which by law must be released in full no later than December 19. Yesterday, Aaron Blake of CNN reported on a Reuters-Ipsos poll which found that only 18% of Americans think it’s “somewhat” or “very” likely that Trump didn’t know about Epstein’s behavior with children. Thirty-nine percent of Republicans say they think he knew, compared to 34% who think he didn’t.

Yesterday, Meryl Kornfield, Hannah Natanson, and Lisa Rein of the Washington Post reported that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is cutting up to 35,000 healthcare positions by the end of the year. Most of those positions are currently unfilled and include doctors, nurses, and support staff. Already this year, the VA has lost almost 30,000 employees from buyout offers and attrition. The reporters say the cuts will reduce the number of VA healthcare employees to about 372,000, down 10% from last year. The administration is trying to steer veterans to the private healthcare system.

On Thursday the House passed a measure to overturn Trump’s elimination of union rights at federal agencies. A bipartisan group of members forced the vote past House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) with a discharge petition, but it is unlikely to pass the Senate, where Republicans oppose it. Trump said ending union rights was necessary to protect national security.

Last week, Sharon Lerner of ProPublica reported that the Environmental Protection Agency announced it is nearly doubling the amount of formaldehyde it considers safe to breathe. Formaldehyde is used in products from building materials and leather goods to craft supplies. It causes cancer, miscarriage, asthma, and other health issues by altering DNA. Lobbyists for the chemical industry have been working to water down government regulation of it for years. The method of assessment behind the proposed new rule for formaldehyde could change government regulation of other carcinogens, as well.

While the government under Trump and MAGA Republicans is backing away from measures that benefit everyday Americans, it is finding the energy to chase Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego Garcia. Ábrego Garcia is from El Salvador, a country he fled in 2011 at age 16 after the Barrio 18 gang threatened his life. In 2019, a judge denied him asylum but granted him protection from removal out of concern for his safety, allowing him to live and work in the U.S. In March, despite the protection from removal, the administration arrested Ábrego Garcia and sent him to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT terrorist prison, where he was beaten and tortured.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to bring him back to the U.S. It appealed; the Supreme Court unanimously ordered it to “facilitate” Ábrego Garcia’s return. The administration claimed that “facilitate” only required it to let him into the country if he arrived; it did not require the government to seek his release.

It brought him back in June, after Tennessee indicted him for transporting immigrants, landing him in prison in that state. While he was in prison, the government tried to remove Ábrego Garcia to several other countries but claimed falsely that Costa Rica, where he asked to go and which had offered to receive him, refused to take him. Instead of sending him to Costa Rica, they continued to imprison him while proposing to send him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and Liberia, countries where he faced harm or the threat of removal to El Salvador and which didn’t want to take him.

In August, Ábrego Garcia was released on bail and went back to Maryland, where officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him when he checked in with them. In October, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw found there was a “realistic likelihood” that the Department of Justice had sought immigrant-trafficking charges against Ábrego Garcia as punishment for challenging his removal to El Salvador.

On Thursday, Judge Xinis said ICE could not hold Ábrego Garcia because there was no final deportation order for him, noting that the judge had not ordered one in 2019. Ábrego Garcia was released at the end of the day, but the administration ordered him to report to ICE’s Baltimore field office at 8:00 the next morning. The Department of Justice had gone to an immigration judge—immigration judges work for the Department of Justice; they are not independent—who issued an order to correct a “scrivener’s error” in the original 2019 order protecting Ábrego Garcia from deportation to say there was a deportation order all along. This appeared to be a precursor to arresting him again.

On Friday, Judge Xinis granted the request of Ábrego Garcia’s lawyers to bar the government from arresting him again until she hears from both parties.

On Friday, Ábrego Garcia checked in at the ICE field office in Baltimore, where he told supporters: “Regardless of this administration, I believe this is a country of laws, and I believe that this injustice will come to its end. Keep fighting. Do not give up. I wish all of you love and justice. Keep going.”

“It turns out that Trump arranged for the dirt from the demolition of the East Wing to be dumped on the East Potomac Golf Links, one of three public golf courses in the Washington, D.C., area Trump is hoping to renovate after pushing aside the nonprofit group that holds a 50-year lease to restore and operate the courses and keep them affordable. All three of the courses—East Potomac, Rock Creek Park Golf, and Langston Golf Course—are on the National Register of Historic Places. Trump says if he takes control of them, D.C. residents will pay a lower fee to use them than golfers from outside the area.”

And we’re supposed to believe that? 🙄

The other two bits I wanted to comment on won’t copy on the iPad. The bit about the arc. What’s the bet it’ll be called Arc de Trump or something?

And Trump condoms, “I’m HUUUUUGE!”

Gross. 🤮

Divine Angel said:

“It turns out that Trump arranged for the dirt from the demolition of the East Wing to be dumped on the East Potomac Golf Links, one of three public golf courses in the Washington, D.C., area Trump is hoping to renovate after pushing aside the nonprofit group that holds a 50-year lease to restore and operate the courses and keep them affordable. All three of the courses—East Potomac, Rock Creek Park Golf, and Langston Golf Course—are on the National Register of Historic Places. Trump says if he takes control of them, D.C. residents will pay a lower fee to use them than golfers from outside the area.”

And we’re supposed to believe that? 🙄

The other two bits I wanted to comment on won’t copy on the iPad. The bit about the arc. What’s the bet it’ll be called Arc de Trump or something?

And Trump condoms, “I’m HUUUUUGE!”

Gross. 🤮

and in breach of the trade practices act false advertising

December 15, 2025 (Monday)

“For the last couple of months, Senator Rumsen has suggested that being president of this country was to a certain extent about character. And although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I’ve been here three years and three days. And I can tell you, without hesitation, being president of this country is entirely about character.”

In 1995, Rob Reiner— who, along with his wife Michele Singer Reiner, lost his life yesterday— directed The American President, written by Andrew Sorkin. In the film, President Andrew Shepherd, a widower, is facing a challenge from Republican presidential hopeful Senator Bob Rumson, who attacks Shepherd by focusing on the activist past of the woman he is dating, lawyer and lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade.

The final scene of the film is a speech by the president rejecting the pretended patriotism of his partisan attacker, who is cynically manipulating voters to gain power. It is a mediation on what it means to be the president of the United States.

“For the record, yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” Shepherd says to reporters at a press conference, “but the more important question is, why aren’t you, Bob? Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman, and a candidate for president choose to reject upholding the Constitution?”

“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say: You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as a land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now, show me that. Defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”

“I’ve known Bob Rumson for years, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumsen is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only, making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.

“That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”

“We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people. And if you want to talk about character, Bob, you better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card.… This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your 15 minutes are up.”

Neophyte said:

December 15, 2025 (Monday)

“For the last couple of months, Senator Rumsen has suggested that being president of this country was to a certain extent about character. And although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I’ve been here three years and three days. And I can tell you, without hesitation, being president of this country is entirely about character.”

In 1995, Rob Reiner— who, along with his wife Michele Singer Reiner, lost his life yesterday— directed The American President, written by Andrew Sorkin. In the film, President Andrew Shepherd, a widower, is facing a challenge from Republican presidential hopeful Senator Bob Rumson, who attacks Shepherd by focusing on the activist past of the woman he is dating, lawyer and lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade.

The final scene of the film is a speech by the president rejecting the pretended patriotism of his partisan attacker, who is cynically manipulating voters to gain power. It is a mediation on what it means to be the president of the United States.

“For the record, yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” Shepherd says to reporters at a press conference, “but the more important question is, why aren’t you, Bob? Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman, and a candidate for president choose to reject upholding the Constitution?”

“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say: You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as a land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now, show me that. Defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”

“I’ve known Bob Rumson for years, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumsen is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only, making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.

“That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”

“We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people. And if you want to talk about character, Bob, you better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card.… This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your 15 minutes are up.”

I think that that might have to be explained to me. I don’t get it.

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

December 15, 2025 (Monday)

“For the last couple of months, Senator Rumsen has suggested that being president of this country was to a certain extent about character. And although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I’ve been here three years and three days. And I can tell you, without hesitation, being president of this country is entirely about character.”

In 1995, Rob Reiner— who, along with his wife Michele Singer Reiner, lost his life yesterday— directed The American President, written by Andrew Sorkin. In the film, President Andrew Shepherd, a widower, is facing a challenge from Republican presidential hopeful Senator Bob Rumson, who attacks Shepherd by focusing on the activist past of the woman he is dating, lawyer and lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade.

The final scene of the film is a speech by the president rejecting the pretended patriotism of his partisan attacker, who is cynically manipulating voters to gain power. It is a mediation on what it means to be the president of the United States.

“For the record, yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” Shepherd says to reporters at a press conference, “but the more important question is, why aren’t you, Bob? Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman, and a candidate for president choose to reject upholding the Constitution?”

“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say: You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as a land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now, show me that. Defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”

“I’ve known Bob Rumson for years, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumsen is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only, making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.

“That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”

“We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people. And if you want to talk about character, Bob, you better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card.… This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your 15 minutes are up.”

I think that that might have to be explained to me. I don’t get it.

Rob Reiner, who was killed yesterday, directed a movie called The American President. Above is some quotes about the POTUS needing to be of good character.

Trump posted some shit about Rob Reiner overnight, so HCR has used quotes from the movie to discuss what a piece of shit Trump is.

Divine Angel said:

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

December 15, 2025 (Monday)

“For the last couple of months, Senator Rumsen has suggested that being president of this country was to a certain extent about character. And although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I’ve been here three years and three days. And I can tell you, without hesitation, being president of this country is entirely about character.”

In 1995, Rob Reiner— who, along with his wife Michele Singer Reiner, lost his life yesterday— directed The American President, written by Andrew Sorkin. In the film, President Andrew Shepherd, a widower, is facing a challenge from Republican presidential hopeful Senator Bob Rumson, who attacks Shepherd by focusing on the activist past of the woman he is dating, lawyer and lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade.

The final scene of the film is a speech by the president rejecting the pretended patriotism of his partisan attacker, who is cynically manipulating voters to gain power. It is a mediation on what it means to be the president of the United States.

“For the record, yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” Shepherd says to reporters at a press conference, “but the more important question is, why aren’t you, Bob? Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman, and a candidate for president choose to reject upholding the Constitution?”

“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say: You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as a land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now, show me that. Defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”

“I’ve known Bob Rumson for years, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumsen is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only, making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.

“That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”

“We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people. And if you want to talk about character, Bob, you better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card.… This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your 15 minutes are up.”

I think that that might have to be explained to me. I don’t get it.

Rob Reiner, who was killed yesterday, directed a movie called The American President. Above is some quotes about the POTUS needing to be of good character.

Trump posted some shit about Rob Reiner overnight, so HCR has used quotes from the movie to discuss what a piece of shit Trump is.

Ah.

Thanks for explaining.

:)