October 31, 2025 (Friday)

Yesterday a reporter asked Representative Joe Neguse, a Democrat of Colorado, about the administration’s withholding of reserve funds Congress intended would fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “If we come to November first, and these contingency funds haven’t been released, if nothing has been accomplished in restoring SNAP benefits, will you call on your Democratic colleagues to reopen the government and deal with these shutdown crises immediately?”

Neguse called out the dynamic in which observers refuse to hold President Donald J. Trump and MAGA Republicans to account and instead demand Democrats step in to fix whatever crisis is at hand. “The basis for your question is, and maybe the better way to state it would be, if the Trump administration continues to violate the law, if the Trump administration unlawfully refuses to release funds so that families in Colorado don’t go hungry, if the Trump administration refuses to follow the law, as they have for the better course of the last nine months, violating statute after statute, if in that scenario these actions unfold, then how will Democrats respond?” Neguse answered.

“That my view would be a more fair characterization of the question that you’ve posed,” Neguse continued, “because it does feel a little bit like we’re in the Twilight Zone here with an administration that is lawless, violates the law with impunity, is now doing so with respect to the release of funds for families that may go hungry.”

Neguse noted that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has kept the House of Representatives from conducting business since mid-September, sending members back to their home districts. “We’re here in Washington,” Neguse told the reporter. “You’re here in Washington. House Republicans are gone. Six weeks and counting. Gone. Literally, gone. Won’t show up in Washington, won’t do town halls back in their respective districts. And somehow the question is posed to the House Democrats as to how we will respond.”

Neguse had a solution. He said: “The Trump administration needs to follow the law…. ou’ve heard all my colleagues repeatedly suggest we would like to negotiate an agreement in good faith with our Republican colleagues. That is why we’re here in our nation’s capital. The question should be posed to Republicans. When will they get serious about working with us in good faith, so that we can reach an agreement?”

Neguse noted that he was frustrated “with the fact that Republicans could just simply abandon their post for six weeks, that the Trump administration could just violate the law without consequence. It should offend everyone,” he said. “It certainly offends me.”

Johnson announced today that the House would not conduct business again next week. The House has not held a vote since September 19.

Also today, two federal judges found that the Trump administration’s suspension of SNAP benefits during the ongoing government shutdown is indeed likely illegal. The administration claims that it cannot use a reserve fund established by Congress for emergencies to distribute benefits scheduled to be cut off on November 1. That claim has drawn lawsuits to try to get food into the hands of the 42 million Americans—one out of eight U.S. residents—who use SNAP, receiving an average of $186 a month.

At a hearing in the lawsuit of Democratic attorneys general and governors against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Office of Management and Budget, and their respective leaders Brooke Rollins and Russell Vought, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts noted: “Congress has put money in an emergency fund, and it is hard for me to understand how this is not an emergency.” She gave the administration until Monday to decide whether to pay SNAP benefits from that fund.

In a lawsuit brought by several cities, a major labor union, and a group of Rhode Island nonprofits, U.S. District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island ordered the USDA to use those emergency funds to provide SNAP benefits. McConnell ordered the administration to provide an update by noon on Monday, November 3.

“There is no doubt that the six billion dollars in contingency funds are appropriated funds that are without a doubt necessary to carry out the program’s operation,” McConnell said. “The shutdown of the government through funding doesn’t do away with SNAP. It just does away with the funding of it. There could be no greater necessity than the prohibition across the board of funds for the program’s operations.”

After returning from a trip to Asia yesterday, Trump left this morning for his thirteenth visit to the Trump Organization’s Florida property Mar-a-Lago. S.V. Date of HuffPost notes this $3.4 million trip brings to $60.7 million the amount taxpayers have spent on the president’s 76 golf outings in his second term.

From Air Force One, Trump posted: “I renovated the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House. It was renovated in the 1940s in an art deco green tile style, which was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era. I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble. This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”

Accompanying the post were a series of twenty-four photographs of the newly renovated bathroom in white marble veined with black, accented with gleaming gold fixtures.

At a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and SNAP is at risk, Trump’s celebration of his marble bathroom was so tone deaf it seems likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration.

Trump also posted about his current remodel of the Kennedy Center, where, according to Travis M. Andrews, Jeremy B. Merrill, and Shelly Tan of the Washington Post, ticket sales have plummeted, leaving tens of thousands of seats empty. “I just inspected the construction on The Kennedy Center,” he wrote. “It is really looking good! The exterior columns, which were in serious danger of corrosion if something weren’t done, are completed, and look magnificent in White Enamel— Like a different place! Marble is being done, stages are being renovated, new seats, new chairs, and new fabrics will soon be installed, and magnificent high end carpeting throughout the building. It is happening faster than anticipated, one of my trademarks. My people are doing a really great job! We are bringing this building back to life. It was dead as a doornail, but it will soon be beautiful again!”

When he arrived in Florida, a reporter asked Trump about the shutdown and whether he would meet with Democrats despite the fact he has, until now, refused to, and has ordered congressional Republicans not to meet with Democrats either. “I’m always going to meet,” he said. “All they have to do is open up the country. Let them open up the country, and we’ll meet. We’ll meet very quickly. But they have to open up the country. It’s their fault, everything is their fault.”

Thanks for posting these HCR Letters.

November 1, 2025 (Saturday)

Yesterday I wrote that President Donald J. Trump’s celebration of his new marble bathroom in the White House was so tone deaf at a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are at risk, that it seemed likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration.

But that image got overtaken just hours later by pictures from a Great Gatsby–themed party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago last night hours before SNAP benefits ended. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby skewered the immoral and meaningless lives of the very wealthy during the Jazz Age who spent their time throwing extravagant parties and laying waste to the lives of the people around them.

Although two federal judges yesterday found that the administration’s refusal to use reserves Congress provided to fund SNAP in an emergency was likely illegal and one ordered the government to use that money, the administration did not immediately do as the judge ordered.

Trump posted on social media that “ur Government lawyers do not think we have the legal authority to pay SNAP,” so he has “instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible.” Blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, Trump added that “even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out.” His post provided the phone number for Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s office, telling people: “If you use SNAP benefits, call the Senate Democrats, and tell them to reopen the Government, NOW!”

“They were careless people,” Fitzgerald wrote, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

This afternoon, Ellen Nakashima and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post reported that the administration is claiming it does not have to consult Congress to continue its attacks on Venezuela. The 1973 War Powers Act says it does.

In 1973, after President Richard M. Nixon ordered secret bombings of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution to reassert its power over foreign wars. “It is the purpose of this joint resolution to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations,” it read.

The law requires a president to notify Congress in writing within 48 hours of the start of hostilities, including the legal grounds for those hostilities, the circumstances that caused them, and an estimate of their scope and duration. The law requires the president to get the approval of Congress for any hostilities lasting more than 60 days.

On September 4, 2025, Trump notified Congress of a strike against a vessel in the Caribbean that he said “was assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and to be engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities.” The letter added: “I am providing this report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution.”

Monday will mark 60 days from that announcement, but the administration does not appear to be planning to ask for Congress’s approval. It has been reluctant to share information about the strikes, first excluding senior Senate Democrats from a Senate briefing, then offering House members a briefing that did not include lawyers and failed to answer basic questions. The top two leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Jack Reed (D-RI), have both said the administration has not produced documents, attack orders, and a list of targets required by law.

Representative Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Nakashima and Robertson: “The administration is, I believe, doing an illegal act and anything that it can to avoid Congress.”

T. Elliot Gaiser, who leads the Office of Legal Counsel under Trump, told a group of lawmakers this week that the administration is taking the position that the strikes on unnamed people in small boats do not meet the definition of hostilities because they are not putting U.S. military personnel in harm’s way. It says the strikes, which have killed more than 60 people, have been conducted primarily by drones launched off naval vessels.

Brian Finucane, who was the War Powers Resolution lawyer at the State Department under President Barack Obama and during Trump’s first term, explained: “What they’re saying is anytime the president uses drones or any standoff weapon against someone who cannot shoot back, it’s not hostilities. It’s a wild claim of executive authority.”
If the administration proceeds without acknowledging the Monday deadline for congressional approval, Finucane said, “it is usurping Congress’s authority over the use of military force.”

FMD

Michael V said:

FMD

They are doing their best to ruin the place.

November 2, 2025 (Sunday)

Last Monday, October 27, right-wing personality Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes for more than two hours, mainstreaming the podcaster whose praise for Hitler, vows to kill Jews, denial of the Holocaust, and apparently gleeful embrace of racism and sexism has, in the past, led establishment Republicans to avoid him.

When Fuentes had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in a gathering with then-former president Donald J. Trump in 2022, Republican officials condemned the meeting. Then Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “There is no room in the Republican Party for anti-semitism or white supremacy.” Amid the blowback, Trump suggested the meeting had been accidental, with Fuentes attending as a guest of rapper Ye, and the dinner being “quick and uneventful.”

Fuentes emerged as a right-wing provocateur in 2016 during a brief stint as a student at Boston University but fell out of establishment channels after appearing at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists and neo-Nazis shouted, “Jews will not replace us.”

Sidelined, Fuentes launched his own independent show, where he attracted a fanbase known as “Groypers” who ferociously opposed established right-wing politics. As Ali Brand noted on Friday in The Atlantic, in 2021, Fuentes said he wanted to drag the Republican Party “kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party.”

Fuentes took on Charlie Kirk, who established Turning Point USA in 2012 as a vehicle to attract young people to right-wing politics, encouraging his supporters to troll Kirk’s events. As Will Sommer reported last Thursday in The Bulwark, just days before Kirk was murdered in September, Fuentes taunted him, saying: “I took your baby, Turning Point USA, and I f*cked it. And I’ve been f*cking it. And that’s why it’s filled with groypers…. We already own you,” he said. “We own this movement.” By the end of October, Fuentes had about a million followers on X.

Certainly, neo-Nazi voices are becoming more obvious in the MAGA party. Last month, Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo of Politico reported on 2,900 pages of messages exchanged on the messaging app Telegram between leaders of the hard-line pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. In the edgy messages, the leaders used racist themes and epithets freely and cheered slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents. They expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

Also last month, the White House was forced to withdraw Trump’s nomination for Paul Ingrassia to head the Office of Special Counsel, a watchdog agency. Republican senators said they would not confirm him after the publication of texts in which Ingrassia said he has “a Nazi streak in me.”

Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed the Young Republicans’ chat as “stupid” jokes made by “kids,” although the eight members of the chat whose ages could be ascertained were 24 to 35 and included a Vermont state senator, chief of staff for a member of the New York Assembly, a staffer in the Kansas attorney general’s office, and an official at the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Carlson seems to think momentum is behind Fuentes. He has given Fuentes access to his own 16.7 million followers on X and posted a photograph of himself with his arm around Fuentes, both of them beaming.

The platforming of a white nationalist by a MAGA influencer who used to be mainstream started a fight on the right.

The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, posted a video defending Carlson’s interview from “the venomous coalition attacking him.” Activists founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank in 1973 in response to the 1971 Powell Memo calling for the establishment of “conservative” institutions to stand against the liberal ones dominating society. Heritage policies became central to the political thought of the Reagan Revolution and went on to shape the foreign policy of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, remaining a powerful force in Republican policy through Trump’s first term.

When Roberts took over the leadership of Heritage in 2021, he dedicated it to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Roberts says he looks to modern Hungary under authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” He brought Heritage and the Orban-linked Danube Institute into a formal partnership. The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán showed in Project 2025, which Heritage led, to map out a future right-wing presidency that guts the civil service and fills it with loyalists; attacks immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals; takes over businesses for friends and family; and moves the country away from the rules-based international order.

After Roberts put out his video, former Senate Republican leader McConnell commented on social media: “The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends. Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats. But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”

Senior analyst for tax policy at the Heritage Foundation Preston Brashers simply posted an image of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting depicting “Freedom of Speech”—a man in a flannel shirt and a Navy bomber jacket standing to speak at a meeting—with the caption “NAZIS ARE BAD.”

When Roberts’s chief of staff Ryan Neuhaus reposted a missive suggesting that those unhappy with Roberts’s video should resign, Brashers retorted that “most of us have been at Heritage a lot longer than he has. But if losing my job at Heritage is the consequence of posting “NAZIS ARE BAD”, it’s a consequence I’m prepared to face.”

The modern Republican Party was always an uneasy marriage between business interests who wanted tax cuts and deregulation, represented by lawmakers like McConnell, and the racist Dixiecrats and religious traditionalists who wanted to get rid of equal rights for racial minorities and women. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” Republican operative Grover Norquist explained in 1985, “but these groups can provide the votes.”

But while business got its tax cuts and deregulation over the years, the base voters of the party—especially the evangelicals who had come to see ending abortion as their key demand—did not see the country reorganized in the racial and gender hierarchies they craved. Trump promised to deliver that for them. When establishment Republicans fell away from Trump after the August 2017 Unite the Right rally—after Congress had passed and Trump had signed the 2017 tax cuts into law—Trump turned to the base, using the threat of their wrath to keep the establishment figures in line.

Now members of that base are strong enough to tie the party itself to Nazism, a line establishment figures like McConnell, who is 83 and retiring from the Senate in 2027, finally seem unwilling to cross.

But there is greater instability behind this fight than the split in today’s Republican Party. What held the Republican coalition together was a call for an end to the New Deal government put in place by both Democrats and Republicans after the Great Crash of 1929. But while wealthier Americans were happy to get their side of the bargain, many Republican voters seem less happy with theirs. They seem to have believed that government programs helped only minorities and what talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh called “feminazis,” but the extreme cuts to the federal government first under billionaire Elon Musk and then under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought have hammered all Americans.

And now those cuts are hitting healthcare and food. Premiums for next year’s healthcare insurance plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplace are skyrocketing, and because of the way subsidies expanded under President Joe Biden, the hardest-hit states will be those that voted for Trump. Democrats in Congress are refusing to sign on to a continuing resolution to end a government shutdown unless the Republicans will work with them to extend the premium tax credits, but Trump is refusing to talk to Democrats about it.

The administration has been pressuring Democrats to agree to the Republicans’ terms for a continuing resolution by refusing to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. On Friday, federal judge John McConnell of Rhode Island ordered the government to use the emergency funds to provide SNAP benefits. Trump promptly took to social media. Bashing the Democrats, he said he would ask the court for direction as to how the government could fund SNAP legally.

On Saturday, Judge McConnell ordered the administration to use reserve funds for at least a partial payment this week and quoted back at him Trump’s social media post claiming “it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding” once McConnell provided more clarity. Meanwhile, economics journalist Catherine Rampell reported today that the administration has told grocery stores that they cannot offer discounts to customers affected by the lapse of SNAP.

That the Republicans are feeling the pressure of voters’ anger shows in the repeated statements of both Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) that they will produce a health plan better than the ACA just as soon as Democrats agree to the continuing resolution. On Air Force One Friday, Trump told reporters that it’s “largely Democrats” who use SNAP, and today Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who oversees SNAP, told the Fox News Channel that Democrats support SNAP because they want to give handouts to undocumented immigrants. Trump “will not tolerate waste, fraud, or abuse while hardworking Americans go hungry,” she posted on social media.

Perhaps it is Trump’s Great Gatsby party of Friday night that has me thinking about the 1920s. Or perhaps it’s the Republicans’ Nazi talk.

The United States had a strong Nazi movement in the 1930s, strong enough that more than 20,000 people attended a Nazi “Pro American” rally in commemoration of George Washington’s birthday in 1939. But it had an even stronger Ku Klux Klan movement in the 1920s, which burned like wildfire in the early years of the century.

After the horrors of World War I, an influenza pandemic, the visible rise of organized crime to get around the prohibition of alcohol, and the ongoing racial and ethnic changes to the country, KKK members across the countryside rallied to an “Americanism” that rejected international involvement, blamed the changes in the country on immigrants and Black Americans, and promised “reform.” Numbering about five million, KKK members swung elections, usually to the Democrats in the South and to the Republicans in the North. “We know we’re the balance of power in the state,” the grand dragon of the Illinois KKK said in 1924, “We can control state elections and get what we want from state government.”

But in 1925, powerful Indiana Klan leader D.C. Stephenson was convicted of raping and murdering Madge Oberholtzer. When the governor, whose election the Klan had supported, refused to pardon him, Stephenson began to name accomplices in the corrupt web of state politics, making it clear that the championing of traditional values had been a con.
Membership in the Klan plummeted, but its anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-New York City sentiments were still strong enough in 1928 to sink Democratic candidate Al Smith. “We now face the darkest hour in American history,” Ku Klux Klan forces wrote when Smith won the Democratic nomination. They called him the “Antichrist” and burned crosses in the fields of Oklahoma when he crossed the state line. Smith won only 40.8% of the vote to Republican Herbert Hoover’s 58.2%.

But then, the next year, the bottom fell out of the 1920s economy of rich and poor that F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered in The Great Gatsby. By 1930, some Americans were on their way to embracing Nazism. But others turned away. As they dealt with economic ruin, rural white Americans had left the KKK, whose membership fell to about 30,000. And in 1932, voters elected Al Smith’s campaign manager, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his own landslide as he focused on a new kind of economy, giving him 57.4% of the vote to Hoover’s 39.6%.

November 3, 2025 (Monday)

At the end of her interview with President Donald J. Trump, recorded on October 31 at Mar-a-Lago and aired last night, heavily edited, on 60 Minutes, Norah O’Donnell of CBS News asked if she could ask two more questions. Trump suggested previous questions had been precleared when he mused aloud that if he said yes, “That means they’ll treat me more fairly if I do—I want to get—It’s very nice, yeah. Now is good. Okay. Uh, oh. These might be the ones I didn’t want. I don’t know. Okay, go ahead.”

O’Donnell noted that the Trump family has thrown itself into cryptocurrency ventures, forming World Liberty Financial with the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. In that context, she asked about billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Binance. Zhao is cryptocurrency’s richest man. He pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering, resigned from Binance, paid a $50 million fine, and was sentenced to four months in prison.

Trump pardoned him on October 23.

O’Donnell noted that the U.S. government said Zhao “had caused ‘significant harm to U.S. national security,’ essentially by allowing terrorist groups like Hamas to move millions of dollars around.” She asked the president, “Why did you pardon him?”

“Okay, are you ready?” Trump answered. “I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. And what I wanna do is see crypto, ‘cause if we don’t do it it’s gonna go to China, it’s gonna go to—this is no different to me than AI.

“My sons are involved in crypto much more than I—me. I—I know very little about it, other than one thing. It’s a huge industry. And if we’re not gonna be the head of it, China, Japan, or someplace else is. So I am behind it 100%. This man was, in my opinion, from what I was told, this is, you know, a four-month sentence.”

After he went on with complaints about the Biden administration—he would mention Biden 42 times in the released transcript—O’Donnell noted, “Binance helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin. And then you pardoned .” She asked him: “How do you address the appearance of pay for play?”

Trump answered: “Well, here’s the thing. I know nothing about it because I’m too busy doing the other….” O’Donnell interrupted: “But he got a pardon….” Trump responded: “I can only tell you this. My sons are into it. I’m glad they are, because it’s probably a great industry, crypto. I think it’s good. You know, they’re running a business, they’re not in government. And they’re good—my one son is a number one bestseller now.

“My wife just had a number one bestseller. I’m proud of them for doing that. I’m focused on this. I know nothing about the guy, other than I hear he was a victim of weaponization by government. When you say the government, you’re talking about the Biden government.” And then he was off again, complaining about the former president and boasting that he would “make crypto great for America.”

“So not concerned about the appearance of corruption with this?” O’Donnell asked.

Trump answered: “I can’t say, because—I can’t say—I’m not concerned. I don’t—I’d rather not have you ask the question. But I let you ask it. You just came to me and you said, ‘Can I ask another question?’ And I said, yeah. This is the question….”

“And you answered…” O’Donnell put in.

“I don’t mind,” Trump said. “Did I let you do it? I coulda walked away. I didn’t have to answer this question. I’m proud to answer the question. You know why? We’ve taken crypto….” After another string of complaints about Biden, he said: “We are number one in crypto and that’s the only thing I care about.”

If, among all the disinformation and repetition Trump spouted in that interview, he did not know who he was pardoning, who’s running the Oval Office?

It appears House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) doesn’t want to know. At a news conference today, journalist Manu Raju noted: “Last week…you were very critical of Joe Biden’s use of the autopen… he didn’t even know who he was pardoning. Last night, on 60 Minutes…Trump admitted not knowing he pardoned a crypto billionaire who pleaded guilty to money laundering. Is that also concerning?”

Johnson answered: “I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t see the interview. You have to ask the president about that. I’m not sure.”

Pleading ignorance of an outrage or that a question is “out of his lane” has become so frequent for Johnson that journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who is very well informed about the news indeed, suggested today that journalists should consider asking Johnson: “Do you ever read the news, and do you agree it’s problematic for the Speaker to be so woefully uninformed?”

Johnson continues to keep the House from conducting business as the government shutdown hit its 34th day today. Tomorrow the shutdown will tie the 35-day shutdown record set during Trump’s first term. Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), whom voters elected on September 23, is still not sworn in. She has said she will be the 218th—and final—vote on a discharge petition to force a vote requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files.

Trump and Johnson continue to try to jam Democratic senators into signing on to the Republicans’ continuing resolution without addressing the end of premium tax credits that is sending healthcare premiums on the Affordable Healthcare Act marketplace soaring. They continue to refuse to negotiate with Democrats, although negotiations have always been the key to ending shutdowns.

To increase pressure, they are hurting the American people.

The shutdown meant that funding for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on which 42 million Americans depend to put food on the table ran out on October 31. Although previous administrations—including Trump’s—have always turned to contingency funds Congress set aside to make sure people can eat, and although the Trump administration initially said it would do so this time as usual, it abruptly announced in October that it did not believe tapping into that reserve was legal. SNAP benefits would not go out.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island ordered the administration to fund payments for SNAP benefits using the reserve Congress set up for emergencies. Since that money—$4.65 billion—will not be enough to fund the entire $8 billion required for November payments, McConnell suggested the administration could make the full payments by tapping into money from the Child Nutrition Program and other funds, but he left discretion up to the administration.

Today the administration announced it would tap only the first reserve, funding just 50% of SNAP benefits. It added that those payments will be delayed for “a few weeks to up to several months.” The disbursement of the reserve, it continued, “means that no funds will remain for new SNAP applicants certified in November, disaster assistance, or as a cushion against the potential catastrophic consequences of shutting down SNAP entirely.”

“Big ‘you can’t make me’ energy,” Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted. It’s also an astonishing act of cruelty, especially as grocery prices are going up—Trump lied that they are stable in the 60 Minutes interview—hiring has slowed, and the nation is about to celebrate Thanksgiving.

The shutdown also threatens the $4.1 billion Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) that helps families cover the cost of utilities or heating oil. Susan Haigh and Marc Levy of the Associated Press note that this program started in 1981 and has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress ever since. Trump’s budget proposal for next year calls for cutting the program altogether, but states expected to have funding for this winter. Almost 6 million households use the program, and as cold weather sets in, the government has not funded it.

When the Republicans shredded the nation’s social safety net in their budget reconciliation bill of July, the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” they timed most of the cuts to take effect after the 2026 midterm elections. But the shutdown is making clear now, rather than after the midterms, what the nation will look like without that safety net.

In the 60 Minutes interview, O’Donnell noted an aspect of Trump’s America that is getting funded during the shutdown. She said, “Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?”

“No,” Trump answered. “I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the—by the judges, the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama.” (In fact, a review by Kyle Cheney of Politico on Friday showed that more than 100 federal judges have ruled at least 200 times against Trump administration immigration policies.

Those judges were appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, and 12 were appointed by Trump himself.)

It appears that the administration did indeed ignore today’s deadline for congressional approval of the ongoing strikes against Venezuela, required under the 1973 War Powers Act. It is taking the position that no approval is necessary since, in its formulation, U.S. military personnel are not at risk in the strikes that have, so far, killed 65 people.

November 4, 2025 (Tuesday)

So much for obeying a court order, even if begrudgingly and with manufactured delay. At 8:00 this morning, President Donald Trump announced that “SNAP BENEFITS…will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

U.S. District Judge John McConnell of the Rhode Island District ordered the administration to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for 43 million Americans at least partially by using a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. The judge also suggested using a different reserve to fund SNAP fully. But the administration is using the hunger of Americans to pressure Democrats to agree to send healthcare premiums skyrocketing, so it dragged its heels as deeply as possible to delay the payments. It said it would fund SNAP only at 50% and that the money could take “weeks or months” to go out.

Trump’s social media account announced that the White House intends to ignore the court’s order, but hours later White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the administration is fully complying with the court order.”

Myah Ward, Alex Gangitano, and Dasha Burns of Politico reported last Friday that Trump expected the Democrats to fold and accept Republican terms to reopen the government no more than ten days into a shutdown. His frustration that they are not doing as he expected is showing, especially as more Americans blame Trump and MAGA Republicans for the shutdown than blame Democrats. Last week, Trump demanded that Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota end the Senate filibuster, enabling the Republicans to pass the House Republicans’ continuing resolution with a simple majority vote. This was a nonstarter, since the filibuster has become central since 2009 to the ability of Republicans to block most Democratic legislation.

S0 Trump is railing at the Democrats—“It’s their fault. Everything is their fault,” he told reporters last week—and ratcheting up pain on the American people.

Adding to the administration’s pressure is Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has been hitting the media to insist that the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault. Today he warned that another week of the shutdown could lead to “mass chaos” that would force him to close some of the nation’s airspace. Air traffic controllers are federal employees and thus have been working without paychecks. Many are calling in sick or not showing up for work, forcing significant flight delays and cancellations.

Today the administration sent notices to federal employees suggesting that furloughed staff won’t be paid when the shutdown ends. Hannah Natanson, Jacob Bogage, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post note that a 2019 law guarantees they will.

Just a reminder: What the Senate Democrats are insisting on before agreeing to a continuing resolution is the extension of the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance marketplace. The Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their July budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—although they extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Without the credits, millions of people will be unable to afford healthcare insurance and will go uncovered, and coverage costs will skyrocket for millions more.

Seventy-eight percent of Americans want those tax credits extended. That includes 59% of Republicans. Only 22% don’t want them extended.

So Trump is refusing even to negotiate with Democrats to end the shutdown when almost 80% of Americans want what the Democrats are demanding.

Trump says the Democrats should back down. “It’s so easily solved,” he told reporters. “All they have to do is say, ‘Let’s go. Let’s open up our country.’” While this course would entrench Trump further as an autocrat who can dictate to the country, the true easy solution seems to be for the Republicans simply to agree to a policy that a solid majority of their own constituents—as well as more than three quarters of the country—want.

This fight is bonkers, but it reflects Trump’s determination to assert his power over the country. That determination showed today in an Axios story by Marc Caputo, Stef W. Kight, and Stephen Neukam. They quoted a Trump advisor as saying that if Senate Republicans don’t pass the continuing resolution without the Democrats by nuking the filibuster, Trump “will make their lives a living hell.” “He will call them at three o’clock in the morning. He will blow them up in their districts. He will call them un-American. He will call them old creatures of a dying institution. Believe you me, he’s going to make their lives just hell.”

Today was Election Day, with crucial elections on the ballots across the country.

In New Jersey, someone emailed bomb threats to precincts this morning. Election officials directed voters to other polling places.

With an approval rating under 40%, Trump spent the day panic-tweeting to suggest the elections are “rigged,” just as he did in 2020. He posted that should New York City voters choose Democrat Zohran Mamdani as mayor, “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home.”

California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.”

Mail-in voting does not shut out Republicans. It makes voting accessible. Asked about Trump’s statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today: “It’s absolutely true that…there’s fraud in California’s elections. It’s just a fact.” The fact is, there is no evidence of any such thing, but Republicans are so eager to stop the measure that one right-wing donor alone spent more than $30 million on the effort.

It seems likely that the administration was preparing to declare a vote in favor of Proposition 50 fraudulent.

Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).

Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.

California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.

And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.

Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three Uber drivers. Just everything.”
Trump posted on social media: “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.”

But in fact, today voters resoundingly rejected Trump and Trumpism, and tomorrow, politics will be a whole different game.

“ California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.” “

He’s such a fkn baby.

Neophyte said:

November 4, 2025 (Tuesday)

So much for obeying a court order, even if begrudgingly and with manufactured delay. At 8:00 this morning, President Donald Trump announced that “SNAP BENEFITS…will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

U.S. District Judge John McConnell of the Rhode Island District ordered the administration to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for 43 million Americans at least partially by using a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. The judge also suggested using a different reserve to fund SNAP fully. But the administration is using the hunger of Americans to pressure Democrats to agree to send healthcare premiums skyrocketing, so it dragged its heels as deeply as possible to delay the payments. It said it would fund SNAP only at 50% and that the money could take “weeks or months” to go out.

Trump’s social media account announced that the White House intends to ignore the court’s order, but hours later White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the administration is fully complying with the court order.”

Myah Ward, Alex Gangitano, and Dasha Burns of Politico reported last Friday that Trump expected the Democrats to fold and accept Republican terms to reopen the government no more than ten days into a shutdown. His frustration that they are not doing as he expected is showing, especially as more Americans blame Trump and MAGA Republicans for the shutdown than blame Democrats. Last week, Trump demanded that Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota end the Senate filibuster, enabling the Republicans to pass the House Republicans’ continuing resolution with a simple majority vote. This was a nonstarter, since the filibuster has become central since 2009 to the ability of Republicans to block most Democratic legislation.

S0 Trump is railing at the Democrats—“It’s their fault. Everything is their fault,” he told reporters last week—and ratcheting up pain on the American people.

Adding to the administration’s pressure is Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has been hitting the media to insist that the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault. Today he warned that another week of the shutdown could lead to “mass chaos” that would force him to close some of the nation’s airspace. Air traffic controllers are federal employees and thus have been working without paychecks. Many are calling in sick or not showing up for work, forcing significant flight delays and cancellations.

Today the administration sent notices to federal employees suggesting that furloughed staff won’t be paid when the shutdown ends. Hannah Natanson, Jacob Bogage, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post note that a 2019 law guarantees they will.

Just a reminder: What the Senate Democrats are insisting on before agreeing to a continuing resolution is the extension of the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance marketplace. The Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their July budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—although they extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Without the credits, millions of people will be unable to afford healthcare insurance and will go uncovered, and coverage costs will skyrocket for millions more.

Seventy-eight percent of Americans want those tax credits extended. That includes 59% of Republicans. Only 22% don’t want them extended.

So Trump is refusing even to negotiate with Democrats to end the shutdown when almost 80% of Americans want what the Democrats are demanding.

Trump says the Democrats should back down. “It’s so easily solved,” he told reporters. “All they have to do is say, ‘Let’s go. Let’s open up our country.’” While this course would entrench Trump further as an autocrat who can dictate to the country, the true easy solution seems to be for the Republicans simply to agree to a policy that a solid majority of their own constituents—as well as more than three quarters of the country—want.

This fight is bonkers, but it reflects Trump’s determination to assert his power over the country. That determination showed today in an Axios story by Marc Caputo, Stef W. Kight, and Stephen Neukam. They quoted a Trump advisor as saying that if Senate Republicans don’t pass the continuing resolution without the Democrats by nuking the filibuster, Trump “will make their lives a living hell.” “He will call them at three o’clock in the morning. He will blow them up in their districts. He will call them un-American. He will call them old creatures of a dying institution. Believe you me, he’s going to make their lives just hell.”

Today was Election Day, with crucial elections on the ballots across the country.

In New Jersey, someone emailed bomb threats to precincts this morning. Election officials directed voters to other polling places.

With an approval rating under 40%, Trump spent the day panic-tweeting to suggest the elections are “rigged,” just as he did in 2020. He posted that should New York City voters choose Democrat Zohran Mamdani as mayor, “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home.”

California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.”

Mail-in voting does not shut out Republicans. It makes voting accessible. Asked about Trump’s statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today: “It’s absolutely true that…there’s fraud in California’s elections. It’s just a fact.” The fact is, there is no evidence of any such thing, but Republicans are so eager to stop the measure that one right-wing donor alone spent more than $30 million on the effort.

It seems likely that the administration was preparing to declare a vote in favor of Proposition 50 fraudulent.

Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).

Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.

California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.

And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.

Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three Uber drivers. Just everything.”
Trump posted on social media: “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.”

But in fact, today voters resoundingly rejected Trump and Trumpism, and tomorrow, politics will be a whole different game.

Maybe, maybe not.

Divine Angel said:

“ California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.” “

He’s such a fkn baby.

Stand by for a really big tantrum. So big that you have never seen a tantrum this bigly.

Heather Cox Richardson

November 5, 2025 (Wednesday)

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a member of both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, began his victory speech last night with a nod to Eugene V. Debs, labor organizer and Socialist candidate for president at the turn of the last century.

“The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”

The 34-year-old mayor-elect’s speech went on to deliver something that was more than a victory speech. It marked a new era much like the one that had given rise to Debs himself. After more than forty years in which ordinary Americans had seen the political system being stacked against them and, over time, forgotten they had agency to change it, they had woken up.

Mandami began by lifting up New York City’s working people, noting that “or as long as we can remember,” they “have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands…. And yet,” he said, “over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.”

“Tonight,” he said, “against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.” New York, he said, had delivered “ mandate for change. ​​A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.”

Mamdani thanked “the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past.” And that was the heart of his message: that democracy belongs to ordinary people. “We will fight for you,” he said, “because we are you.”

He thanked “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.” He assured “every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point” that “this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.”

Mamdani celebrated the hard work of democracy in his win. It was a victory not just for all those who make up New York City, he said, but also for “the more than 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign into an unstoppable force…. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics.”

With that base of Americans engaged in the work of democracy, Mamdami welcomed a new era. “There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us simply to more of the same,” he said. “And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn.”

But in New York City last night, he said, “we have answered those fears…. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy.”

“And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”

Mamdami promised a government that would answer to the demands of the people. It would address the city’s cost-of-living crisis, invest in education, improve infrastructure, and cut bureaucratic waste. It would, he said, work with police officers to reduce crime while also defending community safety and demanding excellence in government.

Mamdami pushed back not just against the smears thrown his way during the campaign, but also against the deliberate division of the country that has been a staple of Republican rhetoric since 1972, when President Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew embraced his role as the key purveyor of “positive polarization.” In its place, he called for community and solidarity.

“In this new age we make for ourselves,” Mamdani said, “we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another…. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too.”

Mamdami, who is Muslim, promised to “build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong—not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.”

He called for a government of both competence and compassion. “For years,” he said, “those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January first, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.”

Mamdani took on the problem of disinformation in modern politics, noting that “many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them.” He laid that disinformation at the feet of the very wealthy in their quest to divide working Americans to make sure they retain power. “s so often occurred,” he said, “the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system.”

Mamdani urged New Yorkers to embrace a “brave new course, rather than fleeing from it.” If they do, he said, “we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”

Mamdani identified the popular momentum to defeat President Donald J. Trump, but made the point that the goal is not simply to stop Trump, but also to stop the next Trump who comes along. While Mamdani’s prescription focused on the avenues of resistance open to New York City government, he emphasized that for the president “to get to any of us,” he will have to “get through all of us.”

Mamdani called for New Yorkers to “leave mediocrity in our past,” and for Democrats to “dare to be great.” When Mamdani said, “New York, this power, it’s yours,” and told New Yorkers, “his city belongs to you,” millions of Americans heard a reminder that they, too, are powerful and that the government of the United States of America belongs to them.

Mamdani won election yesterday backed by just over half the city’s voters, in an election characterized by extraordinarily high turnout. Andy Newman of the New York Times noted yesterday that in the last four New York City mayoral elections, fewer than a third of registered voters turned out. Yesterday, more than 2 million voters voted, the highest turnout for a mayoral election since 1969.

And that turnout is a key part of the story of yesterday’s Democratic wave. As Mamdani said, American voters appear, once again, to be aware of their agency in our democracy.

Bogsnorkler said:

Heather Cox Richardson

November 5, 2025 (Wednesday)

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a member of both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, began his victory speech last night with a nod to Eugene V. Debs, labor organizer and Socialist candidate for president at the turn of the last century.

As Mamdani said, American voters appear, once again, to be aware of their agency in our democracy.

so it’s not the red apple after all but the red queen

:)

Thanks.

I nice positive story for once.

:)

Heather Cox Richardson

November 6, 2025 (Thursday)

“None of this is complicated,” political data specialist Tom Bonier wrote yesterday about Tuesday’s dramatic Democratic victories around the country. “The ran on affordability in 2024. They gave sanctimonious lectures on cable news on election night about how the ‘silent working class majority’ had spoken. Then they governed as reckless authoritarians, punishing the working class.”

For nine months now, officials in the Trump administration have pushed their extremist policies with the insistence that his election gave him a mandate, although more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024 than voted for him. Tuesday’s elections stripped away that veneer to reveal just how unpopular their policies really are.

Aside from the health of the country, this poses a dramatic political problem for the Republicans. The midterm elections are in slightly less than a year, and Tuesday’s vote, which suggests the 2024 MAGA coalition has crumbled, may spell bad news for the mid-decade gerrymandering Republicans have pushed in states they control, like Texas. Republican lawmakers created the new Republican-leaning districts by moving Republican voters into Democratic-leaning districts, thus weakening formerly safe Republican districts. That could backfire in a blue-wave election.

First thing Wednesday morning, on the day the government shutdown became the longest shutdown in history, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote to President Donald J. Trump to “demand a bipartisan meeting of legislative leaders to end the shutdown of the federal government and decisively address the Republican healthcare crisis.” They assured him that “Democrats stand ready to meet with you face to face, anytime and anyplace,” and concluded: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Trump had a different approach to Tuesday’s news. He met with Republican senators before the cameras and admitted that the shutdown had badly hurt the Republicans. But rather than moving to compromise—as all previous presidents have done to end shutdowns—he reiterated his crusade to make sure Democrats can never again hold power. He demanded that Republican senators end the filibuster and, as soon as they do, promptly end mail-in voting and require prohibitive voter ID. “If we do what I’m saying,” he told the senators, Democrats will “most likely never obtain power because we will have passed every single thing that you can imagine.”

Former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stopped Bloomberg News Senate reporter Steven Dennis in the hallway to say: “We’re not going to do that.”

Throughout the day, Trump continued to flood social media with more than 30 social media posts and choppy videos in which, standing in a dark room behind a podium and slurring his speech, he appeared to read from his social media posts, touting his accomplishments, railing against former president Barack Obama, threatening Nigeria with war, and pleading with Republican senators to end the filibuster.

Jenna Amatulli of The Guardian noted that “he bizarre series of posts could raise further questions on Trump’s mental acuity.” More questions arose yesterday after Trump spoke before the America Business Forum saying: “For generations Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa. I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in parts of South Africa. Look at South Africa, what’s going on. Look at South America, what’s going on. You know, I’m not going there. We have a G20 meeting in South Africa.”

Trump seems to be flailing in other ways, too. One takeaway from Tuesday’s vote was that Americans are frustrated at the rising costs of living and slowing job market, and Republicans are suddenly pivoting to claim they are good stewards of the economy. But it’s a hard sell.

One of Trump’s posts yesterday tried to make the point that the economy has improved under his guidance. He posted that “Walmart just announced that Prices for a Thanksgiving Dinner is now down 25% since under Sleepy/Crooked Joe Biden, in 2024. AFFORDABILITY is a Republican Stronghold. Hopefully, Republicans will use this irrefutable fact!”

But readers noted that Walmart’s 2024 Thanksgiving meal contained 21 items while the 2025 list includes only 15, and that most of the brand name items listed in the 2024 meal were replaced with Walmart brand items in 2025.

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard arguments concerning the legality of Trump’s tariff war, the centerpiece of his economic plan. Trump seemed to try to pressure the Supreme Court to save his tariffs, posting that the case before the court “is, literally, LIFE OR DEATH for our Country.”

But the Constitution gives power over tariffs to Congress alone. Three lower courts have found that Trump’s assumption of power to set tariffs through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives the president power to regulate international commerce after declaring an emergency in response to an external threat against the United States, is unconstitutional.

As Chris Geidner of Law Dork explained, the Supreme Court justices seemed inclined to agree with the lower courts that Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional. Undermining Trump’s insistence that the tariffs are paid by foreign countries, in yesterday’s arguments the administration’s lawyer admitted that American consumers pay from 30% to 80% of the tariffs.

Today Trump disagreed and changed the justification for the tariffs to national security, ground on which he likely expects the Supreme Court to support him. “No, I don’t agree,” he told a reporter. “I think that they might be paying something, but when you take the overall impact, the Americans are gaining tremendously. They’re gaining through national security. Look, I’m ending war because of these tariffs. Americans would have to fight in some of these wars.”

Today brought more bad news for Americans living in Trump’s economy. A report today showed that in October, layoff announcements hit their highest level in more than 20 years. According to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a private firm that collects data on workplace reductions, Abha Bhattarai of the Washington Post reported, U.S. employers have announced 1.1 million layoffs so far in 2025. That number rivals job cuts during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced today that a shortage of air traffic controllers will force flight reductions at forty of the nation’s busiest airports starting tomorrow. This will affect both commercial and cargo traffic. Today airlines began to cancel hundreds of flights. The Federal Aviation Administration said that reductions will begin at 4% on Friday and go up until they hit 10% on November 14.

The administration is tripping in court over its immigration policies, as well.

On Monday, jury selection began in the trial of Sean Dunn, a former paralegal for the Department of Justice, charged with a misdemeanor for throwing a salami submarine sandwich “at point blank range” at a federal agent after a grand jury refused to authorize felony charges. As former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance noted, prosecuting this case while dismissing others—like the issue of border czar Tom Homan allegedly accepting $50,000 to steer contracts toward a certain firm—diminishes the public’s confidence in the Justice Department.

The case also made the administration seem like a joke as a federal agent wearing a bulletproof vest tried to claim a sandwich that remained intact in its wrapper “exploded” against his chest. Punsters had a field day all week. This afternoon, the jury acquitted Dunn.

“He beat the wrap,” one poster wrote.

Trump’s immigration policies were in court in Chicago today, too, where U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis issued a broad injunction to stop federal agents’ undisciplined use of tear gas, pepper balls, and other “less-lethal” crowd control measures. As Heather Cherone of WTTW reported, Ellis found that federal agents had violated protesters’ First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly while preventing the free exercise of religion by using force against clergy members. Ellis repeatedly called out federal agents for lying.

And, in the District of Rhode Island, U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell found the administration had ignored his order to pay Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits this week. He accused the administration of withholding SNAP benefits “for political reasons” and called out Trump’s social media post saying SNAP would be funded only after the shutdown ends as “an intent to defy the court order.” McConnell ordered the administration to make full SNAP payments to the states by tomorrow for distribution to beneficiaries.

The Trump administration immediately appealed.

“ Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced today that a shortage of air traffic controllers will force flight reductions at forty of the nation’s busiest airports starting tomorrow. This will affect both commercial and cargo traffic. Today airlines began to cancel hundreds of flights. The Federal Aviation Administration said that reductions will begin at 4% on Friday and go up until they hit 10% on November 14.”

Just in time for thanksgiving too, great job GOP 👍🏼

…….The case also made the administration seem like a joke as a federal agent wearing a bulletproof vest tried to claim a sandwich that remained intact in its wrapper “exploded” against his chest. Punsters had a field day all week. This afternoon, the jury acquitted Dunn.

“He beat the wrap,” one poster wrote……..

LOL

:)

Thanks.

November 7, 2025 (Friday)

The repercussions from Tuesday’s vote, in which Democratic candidates were victorious across the country, continue to echo.

Since Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump has tried to reinforce the idea that he is, in fact, in control of the country, no matter what voters say. He has doubled down on his demand that the Republican senators end the government shutdown by killing the Senate filibuster, enabling them to pass legislation without any Democrats. Then they could pass the continuing resolution the House passed on September 19, the last day the House was in session to work.

But Republican senators don’t want to get rid of the filibuster. It serves their ideology of slashing the government. Democrats want to pass legislation that changes society, while Republicans want to stop such legislation. The current exceptions to the filibuster enable Republicans to fund the government and even to get tax cuts, but the wide swath of legislation that can be stopped by the filibuster generally neuters Democratic policies.

The filibuster also protects Republican senators from having to take painful votes on the hot-button cultural issues important to the Republican base but hated by the general public: things like abortion bans, for example. The filibuster means they can trust the Democrats to stop such measures before Republican senators have to go on record as either for them or against them.

Today, speaking during a meeting at the White House with Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Trump demanded again that Republicans end the filibuster. He tried to assuage Republican concerns that if they nuke the filibuster, Democrats in power in the future would use a simple majority to pass whatever legislation they wish. Trump said there was no need to worry about future Democratic control because by getting rid of the filibuster, Republicans could pass legislation that would guarantee they would “never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election” again.

As House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced he is keeping the House out of session again next week, for the eighth consecutive week, and as Trump pressured Republicans to rubber-stamp his wishes, the Democrats today offered a compromise to end the shutdown.

Senate Democrats have stood firm on the principle that they would not vote for the continuing resolution the House passed on September 19—the last day it held a vote—without the Republicans agreeing to extend permanently the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act markets. Without those credits, millions of Americans will lose healthcare coverage, and healthcare premiums for millions more will skyrocket. About three quarters of Americans want those premium tax credits extended.

Today, on the floor of the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the Democrats would vote to end the government shutdown in exchange for a one-year extension of the expiring premium tax credits and the establishment of a bipartisan committee to figure out how to revise the tax credits so they could continue past next year’s open enrollment period. This would have answered the short-term problems of the increasingly painful government shutdown and skyrocketing premiums and left the question of extending the premium tax credits to voters next year.

If Republicans took the deal, the Democrats could claim they had negotiated an end to the shutdown that put into place the popular extensions of the premium tax credits and that called for next year’s midterm voters to decide if they wanted them extended further.

But if Republicans rejected it, Democrats would be in the position of having offered a reasonable—even a popular—deal that Republicans refused because Trump insisted they must not negotiate. Such an outcome would make the Republicans own the ongoing shutdown.

Republicans rejected the offer outright. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) called it a “nonstarter” that “doesn’t even get close, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called it “political terrorism.” The rejection put the Republicans in the awkward position of rejecting the reopening of the government because they are determined to kill a measure that is popular with three-quarters of the American people.

After a closed-door Republican conference meeting, Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) told reporters: “What we have here is an intergalactic freak show.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said it was “insane” that President Trump and Republican congressional leaders have refused to talk to Democrats to negotiate a deal. “They refuse to engage,” he told Jordain Carney, Katherine Tully-McManus, and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico. “It’s killing the country.”

Tonight Trump appeared to be trying to keep pressure on the Republicans to kill the filibuster or the Democrats to cave by tightening the screws on the American people. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to stay the order of U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell to distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by the end of today. This puts the administration in the position of going to the Supreme Court for permission to stop the distribution of food benefits for 42 million Americans.

While senators say they will stay in Washington and work to end the shutdown, Trump is following House speaker Johnson’s lead and getting out of town, heading to Florida for the weekend.

“ Since Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump has tried to reinforce the idea that he is, in fact, in control of the country, no matter what voters say. He has doubled down on his demand that the Republican senators end the government shutdown by killing the Senate filibuster, enabling them to pass legislation without any Democrats”

🎶everybody wants to rule the world🎶

Ta.

November 8, 2025 (Saturday)

A picture for tonight after a very long week. Or two.

In addition to everything else, the time change always throws me for a loop.

Let’s take the night off and pick it all back up tomorrow.

Dunno what LMM has got to do with it but some might find this interesting enough to attend virtually

November 9, 2025 (Sunday)

In order to pressure the Democrats to cave to Trump’s demands that they sign on to the House Republicans’ continuing resolution to fund the government, the administration has been refusing to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that 42 million Americans depend on to eat.

On September 19, House Republicans passed a continuing resolution to fund the government. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has kept the House from doing any work since then, sending members home in an attempt to force the Senate to pass the House measure. The Democrats don’t want to: they have refused to agree to the resolution unless the Republicans agree to extend the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance markets. The end of those credits at the end of this year means millions of Americans will lose their healthcare insurance and the premiums for others will skyrocket. It will be a blow to the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans want to get rid of.
SNAP needs about $8 billion for the month of November. There are two reserve accounts set up by Congress, one with about $6 billion in it that can be used to fund SNAP during emergencies and the other with about $23 billion to be used for nutrition programs. In past shutdowns, administrations—including the first Trump administration—tapped reserves to fund SNAP.

But in October, the administration said it would not use the emergency funds, essentially starving Americans to get Democrats to do as Republicans want and dramatically weaken the Affordable Care Act. Multiple groups sued.
Last week, U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island ordered the administration to use the emergency reserves to fund SNAP at least partially and to consider using the nutrition money to fund it fully. The administration said it would use the reserve for partial funding but that disbursing a fraction of benefits would create an administrative problem that would take weeks or even months to sort out, delaying payments.

Last Thursday, Judge McConnell found that the Trump administration had ignored his order to pay at least partial SNAP benefits last week and ordered the Trump administration to distribute the full amount of SNAP benefits for November to the states for distribution by the end of Friday.

As Steve Vladeck explained in One First, the administration appealed McConnell’s order to the First Circuit and also asked the First Circuit to pause the order while the court of appeals decided. When the First Circuit hadn’t ruled by late Friday afternoon, the administration filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court to ask it to stay McConnell’s order.
The emergency action fell to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Shortly after 9:00 p.m. EST, she issued the administrative stay the administration wanted, apparently getting ahead of the chance that the full court would overrule her if she declined to issue it. As Vladeck notes, she used her ruling to give the First Circuit a deadline to decide if it would permit the SNAP funding to go forward.

Vladeck writes that Jackson was “stuck between a rock and a hard place,” and he reiterates the obvious point that the Trump administration doesn’t need a court order to pay out SNAP benefits. It could simply do it, as previous administrations have during a shutdown.

In the back-and-forth on Friday, the administration appears to have opened up state payments for SNAP, and several states received their full payments, while others did not. States that received full payments worked to get that funding through to beneficiaries’ Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards immediately.

Saturday, Patrick Penn, the deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees SNAP, sent a memo to the states saying that “o the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized. Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025…. ailure to comply with this memorandum may result in USDA taking various actions, including cancellation of the Federal share of State administrative costs and holding States liable for any overissuances that result from the noncompliance.”

“Yikes,” economic editor at The Bulwark Catherine Rampell wrote. “Astonishing how hard this administration is working to keep people hungry. It’s clear they are trying maximize public suffering, in hopes of getting people to blame Dems for that suffering. But it’s transparently the White House working overtime to keep the suffering going!”

Rampell asked Georgetown law professor David Super what it means for the states to claw back benefits they already sent out. He answered that “his seems to be USDA howling into the void after its terrible communications led many states to think that they were free to do what USDA should have told them to do all along…. I do not see how USDA can do anything to the states,” he wrote, since the error was not a systems error or mistaken issuance. He speculated that the memo was an attempt “to intimidate states that are considering issuing full November benefits.”

Wisconsin governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, simply posted on social media: “No.”

The administration also ratcheted up pain on the American people by warning that the ongoing crisis of unpaid air traffic controllers would cause more and more disruption to U.S. travel. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has cut thousands of flights from the nation’s busiest airports, and today, when Jake Tapper of CNN asked Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy “how many Americans will not be able to be with their families for because of this,” Duffy answered: “I think the number is going to be substantial.”

Amid the fight over SNAP during the longest government shutdown in history, President Donald J. Trump spent the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, where he hosted another extravagant dinner party complete with scallops, beef filet, and ice sculptures. Today, as part of his defense of his tariffs, Trump promised on social media that “ dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared to know nothing about the promise but told ABC host George Stephanopoulos that “he $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms and lots of ways,” including in the form of the tax cuts Trump and the Republicans have extended—the ones that primarily benefit the wealthy and corporations.

Tonight Trump attended an NFL football game between the Washington Commanders and the Detroit Lions after ESPN reported that he wants the Commanders to name their new stadium after him. Attendees soundly booed him.

Today, former U.S. district judge Mark L. Wolf, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by President Ronald Reagan, explained that he resigned on Friday because he wanted the freedom to do “everything in my power to combat today’s existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.” Wolf called out Trump’s use of the Department of Justice to hurt his political opponents, his firing of inspectors general, the administration’s pay-to-play policies in which wealthy donors get government favors, the corruption of cryptocurrency, unconstitutional executive orders, and the threats against judges as Trump attacks the rule of law.

“I resigned in order to speak out, support litigation, and work with other individuals and organizations dedicated to protecting the rule of law and American democracy,” Wolf wrote. “I also intend to advocate for the judges who cannot speak publicly for themselves.” Because Wolf took senior status in 2013 and his successor was appointed then, his resignation will not create a vacancy for Trump to fill.

Tonight, the news is swirling about Democratic senators agreeing to a deal to end the government shutdown, but so far, the contours of such an agreement are not clear.

Besides suck up points and getting high fives I wonder what possible tangible benefit tax cuts to rich achieve.
It doesn’t help them with living costs, its pure self indulgence I imagine.

Cymek said:

Besides suck up points and getting high fives I wonder what possible tangible benefit tax cuts to rich achieve.
It doesn’t help them with living costs, its pure self indulgence I imagine.

if you cut their taxes by $1000000 they might donate $1000 to your campaign plus nice dinners

Thanks.

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

Besides suck up points and getting high fives I wonder what possible tangible benefit tax cuts to rich achieve.
It doesn’t help them with living costs, its pure self indulgence I imagine.

if you cut their taxes by $1000000 they might donate $1000 to your campaign plus nice dinners

Pretty much.

Michael V said:

Thanks.

why, did they cut your taxes

SCIENCE said:

Michael V said:

Thanks.

why, did they cut your taxes

No, silly.

I was thanking buffy for posting the HCR letter.

November 10, 2025 (Monday)

Last night, the Senate advanced a measure to end the government shutdown, which at 41 days today is the longest in U.S. history.

Seven Democrats and one Independent voted with all but one Republican to advance a measure that funds the government through January 30 of next year. It includes funding for military construction and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and operations for the legislative branch, or Congress. Tucked within that last appropriation is a measure that allows the eight Republican senators whose phone logs were seized during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to sue the government for up to $500,000 apiece.

The measure stops the administration’s firings of public employees during the shutdown, reinstating them with full pay. States will be reimbursed for monies they spent covering for federal shortfalls during the shutdown. This means air traffic controllers, who have been working without pay for more than a month, will get paid again.

The measure also funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), although it does not restore the cuts Republicans made to it in their budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

While the measure provides more funding for Indian health services, it does nothing to extend the premium tax credits for insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act healthcare marketplace. Without those credits, millions will lose their healthcare insurance and millions more will face skyrocketing premiums. Republicans did not extend the premium tax credits in their July budget reconciliation bill of July, although they did extend tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

Senate Democrats said they would not advance a measure to end the shutdown without a deal to extend the premium tax credits, but seven of them, along with one Independent, have now done so. Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has promised to bring to the Senate floor a bill to extend the premium tax credits before the end of the second week of December. It will be written by the Democrats.

In the 60–40 vote, Rand Paul (R-KY) did not join the rest of the Republican senators to advance the measure. Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Independent Angus King of Maine all voted with the Republicans to advance the measure.

Last night’s vote did not pass the bill, which still faces procedural hurdles in the Senate that the chamber is trying to clear tonight. If it passes the Senate, as seems likely, it will go to the House, which must either pass it, reject it, or amend it.

If Trump signs the measure into law, the 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP payments will get relief. The two million federal workers who need paychecks will get them, and airlines should eventually get back to business as usual. These are no small things: aside from the individual human cost of the shutdown, the undermining of the federal government threatened to destroy it, and the administration’s cuts to air traffic were hitting cargo planes, adding yet another blow to the weakening economy just before the busiest shopping season of the year.

News of the terms of the deal to end the shutdown hit the country rather like a cue ball hitting a rack: lots of balls started to move in wildly different directions.

The eight senators who voted with the Republicans appear to have lost any hope Trump would negotiate and, in that absence, decided they had to relieve the pain of the shutdown. As Dan Drezner noted in his Drezner’s World, Trump’s behavior during the shutdown made it clear he simply didn’t care how badly Americans got hurt. “He did not just refuse to negotiate,” Drezner noted. “During the shutdown month he also completely bulldozed the East Wing, cut SNAP benefits, witnessed producers passing on the cost of tariffs to consumers, announced curbs on air travel, and participated in a Great Gatsby–style party at Mar-a-Lago.”

Voters hated this, but Trump didn’t appear to care. Indeed, his administration was working to ratchet up the pain of lost SNAP payments and canceled flights, including not just passenger planes but cargo planes right before the shopping season in which many businesses make the income that keeps them afloat for the year. In the senators’ statements about why they voted with the Republicans, Drezner noted a pattern: the words “pain” and “hurt.”

As Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark noted, the Democrats gave in to Republican plans with few concessions, but the shutdown hurt Trump’s popularity and the Democrats won a vote on the ACA subsidies, which is a terrible issue for the Republicans. Seventy-eight percent of Americans actually want such a measure to pass, meaning that a vote—even one only in the Senate—will help clarify for voters what’s at stake.

Another moving ball was the voters and organizers who turned out for Democrats last Tuesday and who had made it very clear they think it’s long overdue for the Democrats to stand up to Trump. Ezra Levin of Indivisible, which organized the No Kings rallies, described his reaction to the deal as “incandescent rage, incredible disappointment.” “What do we do to demand a better party, a party that actually fights back?” he asked.

Democratic party leaders appeared to acknowledge that the momentum of the party is behind a fight against Trump and MAGA authoritarianism. The senators who voted with the Republicans are all either retiring, not up for election in 2026, or not running for another office, while Democrats who are in one of those categories were vocal about their anger over the vote.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted a video on social media warning: “Bullies gain power when righteous people yield to the face of their wrongdoing. I didn’t want this shutdown. I want it to end, but not at any cost. And of course, I wish that there was a path to saving this democracy and saving people’s health care that didn’t involve pain. This shutdown hurt. It did. But unfortunately, I don’t think there is a way to save this country, to save our democracy, without there being some difficult, hard moments along the way…. here’s no way to defend this,” he said. “And you are right to be angry about it. I’m angry about it.”

There are Republican balls in play, as well.

President Donald J. Trump did not want the shutdown to end this way. He was trying to use the pain he was inflicting on the American people to force Republican senators to end the filibuster and pass a series of measures that would essentially have made him a dictator. The Republican senators were clear they didn’t want to do that. And now, they haven’t. They chose a way out of the shutdown fight that did not support Trump’s ambitions. After nine months in which they appeared to do his bidding, that’s an interesting development.

Trump does not appear to be giving up his position on hurting the country easily. Late last night, three judges from the First Circuit refused to stop the lower court order saying that the administration must pay SNAP benefits in full, and today, the administration went back to the Supreme Court to ask it to freeze those payments.

Trump also posted an attack on air traffic controllers, saying to those who took time off during the shutdown “I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU. You didn’t step up to help the U.S.A. against the FAKE DEMOCRAT ATTACK that was only meant to hurt our Country. You will have a negative mark, at least in my mind, against your record. If you want to leave service in the near future, please do not hesitate to do so, with NO payment or severance of any kind! You will be quickly replaced by true Patriots, who will do a better job….” In fact, the country has a shortage of air traffic controllers.

Trump called Democrats “the enemy” today, but told reporters he would abide by the deal, saying that “they haven’t changed anything.” But they have.

And that’s yet another moving ball. If the Senate passes its measure and sends it to the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will have to bring the House into session to conduct work. He has had the chamber on hiatus since September 19, 2025, when the Republicans passed a continuing resolution that offered the Democrats nothing, and has kept members out of Washington, D.C., ever since.

Bringing the House back into session will require Johnson to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ). Erum Salam of MSNBC reported that Johnson told Republicans on a conference call today that the “first order of business will be to administer the oath to Grijalva.” Grijalva says she will be the final signer on the discharge petition that will force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. Johnson and administration officials have worked hard to keep those files under wraps, especially since news broke that Trump is mentioned in them.

And then, in the midst of all the drama last night, Justice Department pardon attorney Ed Martin posted a document on social media revealing that Trump had issued an extraordinarily broad pardon to “all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of Presidential Electors, whether or not recognized by any State or State official, in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election, as well as for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

As Kyle Cheney of Politico noted, the pardons of those who tried to steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump were largely symbolic because they had not been charged with federal crimes. What they do is suggest that he will protect those who try to cheat for him in the future, an interesting development considering the measure in the government-funding bill allowing senators to sue the government for accessing their phone logs during the events of January 6, 2021.

The sweeping pardons also might be softening up the ground for a pardon or a commutation for convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A whistleblower has provided documents to the House Judiciary Committee showing that Maxwell has asked for a commutation of her prison sentence.

And Trump’s popularity continues to drag. Last night he got soundly booed at a Washington Commanders football game.

Lots of balls moving around the table.

Lots of Noise. Bit like listening to radio static, comes and goes in waves.

Thanks Neophyte. I checked not long ago and it wasn’t up yet.

Thanks for posting the HCR letter.

November 11, 2025 (Tuesday)

In 1918, at the end of four years of World War I’s devastation, leaders negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was not technically the end of the war, which came with the Treaty of Versailles. Leaders signed that treaty on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the conflict. But the armistice declared on November 11 held, and Armistice Day became popularly known as the day “The Great War,” which killed at least 40 million people, ended.

In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commemorated Armistice Day, saying that Americans would reflect on the anniversary of the armistice “with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations….”

But Wilson was disappointed that the soldiers’ sacrifices had not changed the nation’s approach to international affairs. The Senate, under the leadership of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts—who had been determined to weaken Wilson as soon as the imperatives of the war had fallen away—refused to permit the United States to join the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild: a forum for countries to work out their differences with diplomacy, rather than resorting to bloodshed.

On November 10, 1923, just four years after he had established Armistice Day, former President Wilson spoke to the American people over the new medium of radio, giving the nation’s first live, nationwide broadcast.

“The anniversary of Armistice Day should stir us to a great exaltation of spirit,” he said, as Americans remembered that it was their example that had “by those early days of that never to be forgotten November, lifted the nations of the world to the lofty levels of vision and achievement upon which the great war for democracy and right was fought and won.”

But he lamented “the shameful fact that when victory was won,…chiefly by the indomitable spirit and ungrudging sacrifices of our own incomparable soldiers we turned our backs upon our associates and refused to bear any responsible part in the administration of peace, or the firm and permanent establishment of the results of the war—won at so terrible a cost of life and treasure—and withdrew into a sullen and selfish isolation which is deeply ignoble because manifestly cowardly and dishonorable.”

Wilson said that a return to engagement with international affairs was “inevitable”; the U.S. eventually would have to take up its “true part in the affairs of the world.”

Congress didn’t want to hear it. In 1926 it passed a resolution noting that since November 11, 1918, “marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed,” the anniversary of that date “should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”

In 1938, Congress made November 11 a legal holiday to be dedicated to world peace.

But neither the “war to end all wars” nor the commemorations of it, ended war.

Just three years after Congress made Armistice Day a holiday for peace, American armed forces were fighting a second world war, even more devastating than the first. The carnage of World War II gave power to the idea of trying to stop wars by establishing a rules-based international order. Rather than trying to push their own boundaries and interests whenever they could gain advantage, countries agreed to abide by a series of rules that promoted peace, economic cooperation, and security.

The new international system provided forums for countries to discuss their differences—like the United Nations, founded in 1945—and mechanisms for them to protect each other, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, which has a mutual defense pact that says any attack on a NATO country will be considered an attack on all of them.

In the years since, those agreements multiplied and were deepened and broadened to include more countries and more ties. While the U.S. and other countries sometimes fail to honor them, their central theory remains important: no country should be able to attack a neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. This concept preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century, but it is a concept that is currently under attack as autocrats increasingly reject the idea of a rules-based international order and claim the right to act however they wish.

In 1954, to honor the armed forces of wars after World War I, Congress amended the law creating Armistice Day by striking out the word “armistice” and putting “veterans” in its place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and who had become a five-star general of the Army before his political career, later issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe Veterans Day:

“et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”

November 12, 2025 (Wednesday)

It turns out Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and House Democrats were right to call it the “Epstein Shutdown” for the last several weeks on social media and in interviews. As Marc Elias of Democracy Docket put it today, while it was clear what the Democrats wanted from the shutdown—lower costs for healthcare insurance premiums, affordability, and for Trump to stop breaking the law—it was never clear what the Republicans wanted. They seemed simply to be doing as Trump demanded.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) kept House members from conducting any business at all. The House last voted on September 19, gathering in Washington, D.C., again only after the Senate on Monday passed a measure to reopen the government. The hiatus gave Johnson an excuse not to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), whose voters elected her on September 23. Grijalva had promised to be the 218th and final vote on a discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a measure that would require the Department of Justice to release files relating to the government investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Elias notes that he, like many of us, considered as plausible the idea that the government shutdown was a way to keep the Epstein files under wraps, but there were other plausible theories as well. Maybe Trump and his cronies wanted to gut the federal workforce. Maybe they wanted to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Maybe Trump simply wanted to run the country without the interference of Congress.

Today put the Epstein files firmly in the center of the story.

The House got down to business this morning after a 54-day break to work on the Senate measure to reopen the government. Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform immediately released three emails from a cache of more than 23,000 documents the committee received recently from the Epstein estate. The first email was one Epstein sent to his associate Ghislaine Maxwell on April 2, 2011. It referred to a story in which the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes solved a case by noting that a dog didn’t bark at a crime scene because it knew the perpetrator. The reference has come to mean an expected action or piece of evidence whose absence proves guilt.

Epstein wrote: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75% there.” Maxwell replied: “I have been thinking about that…”

The second email the Democrats released was from January 2019, from Epstein to Trump biographer Michael Wolff. In it, Epstein said of Trump: “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop”

In a third email thread from December 2015, after Trump had declared his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, Wolff told Epstein that CNN would ask Trump about his relationship with Epstein. Epstein asked what Wolff thought Trump should answer. Wolff wrote: “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house,… ou can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”

As legal analyst Asha Rangappa noted, this exchange suggests that Epstein would have leverage over Trump if Trump tried to say he had not been at Epstein’s house or on his plane, in other words, that Trump was there and Epstein had receipts.

After the Democrats released these three emails, Johnson called the release “nother publicity stunt by the Democrats” and claimed: “They’re trying to mislead people.” Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) issued a statement accusing the Democrats of “cherry-picking documents and politicizing information.” The committee then released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the Epstein estate.

Those were hardly better. In a 2015 email, Epstein gave tips on stories about Trump and girls to then–New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. When others asked Thomas for stories, Epstein wrote: “Have them ask my houseman about donad almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” In another email, Epstein offered “photso of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas urged: “I am serious man—for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there.”

But the New York Times sat on this story through the 2016 presidential election and beyond.

In one 2018 email referring to Trump’s payment of hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, Epstein wrote: “i know how dirty donald is.”

Despite how explosive these documents were, they do not appear to be the end of the story. They came from the Epstein estate, but the files from the FBI investigation into Trump have not yet been released. Whatever is still outstanding appears to be even worse than what we have seen, as evidenced by Trump’s frantic attempts to stop the discharge petition.

With the House back at work, Johnson had little choice but to swear in Grijalva. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:00.

In the hours before that deadline, the president tried to get one of the four Republican representatives who had signed the discharge petition to remove their signature. He appeared to focus on Nancy Mace (R-SC), with whom he tried to connect by phone, and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whom he invited to meet with him in the White House Situation Room, which is equipped to prevent recording. CNN reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel joined Trump and Boebert at the meeting.

When asked about the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Doesn’t that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?” For his part, Trump took to social media to call the released documents an attempt by Democrats to bring up the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to deflect from “how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.” He urged “any Republicans involved” to be “focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”

Trump’s efforts to get someone to take their name off the discharge petition failed. Johnson swore in Grijalva at 4:00, as scheduled, and she immediately signed it. Now the petition needs to “ripen” for seven legislative days. Then Johnson has two legislative days to schedule a vote on a measure to require the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files it holds.

Faith Wardwell and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported this evening that senior Republicans believe as many as 100 Republicans will support the bill when it comes to the floor. Many of them are facing constituents who voted for Trump in the belief that he would release the Epstein files as he promised and who are angry that the administration appears to be covering them up in the service of rich elites. Others likely recognize that they do not want to be seen as participating in that coverup, especially with the threat of even worse material waiting to drop.

If the House passes the bill, it will go to the Senate and, if the Senate passes it, to Trump for his signature. If he vetoes it, Congress has the option to override his veto.

In the past, Trump has managed to avoid accountability for his actions by using lawsuits to delay while whipping up his supporters to take his side against what he called “witch hunts” or “hoaxes.” Republican lawmakers went along in part because they didn’t want to alienate his base.

Now, though, a significant portion of MAGA has broken with him, his popularity is low—a new Associated Press–NORC poll has his approval rating at 33%— and last week’s elections showed his coalition is abandoning him. It is not clear that Republican senators will defend him, especially since his erratic behavior—like bulldozing the East Wing of the White House—appears to be increasing.

As Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who backed the House discharge petition, told CNN: “This vote is going to be on your record for longer than Trump is going to be president. And what are you going to do in 2028 and 2030 when you’re in a debate…and they say, ‘How can we trust you? You covered up for a pedophile back in 2025.’”

Midday today, as new revelations from the Epstein documents were hitting social media every few minutes, Representative Swalwell posted: “This is the beginning of the end.”

Tonight the House passed the Senate’s continuing resolution to fund the government, ending the longest government shutdown in U.S. history: 43 days. The vote was 222–209, with all but two Republicans voting in favor and all but six Democrats voting against it, saying they would not support a continuing resolution that did not extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act markets. Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—and without them, millions of Americans will be unable to afford healthcare coverage, and premiums will skyrocket for millions more.

The measure funds the government through January 30, 2026; overturns the layoffs of federal employees administration officials made during the shutdown and guarantees workers’ pay; and appropriates money to pay for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits through September 2026, taking them out of Trump’s hands as a pressure point in January.

Failing to get an extension of the healthcare premium tax credits into the continuing resolution, House Democrats filed a discharge petition to force the House to vote on a measure that would extend the credits for three years. “There are only two ways this fight will end,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told his colleagues. “Either Republicans finally decide to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits this year. Or the American people will throw Republicans out of their jobs next year and end the speakership of Donald J. Trump once and for all.”

Neophyte said:

Those were hardly better. In a 2015 email, Epstein gave tips on stories about Trump and girls to then–New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. When others asked Thomas for stories, Epstein wrote: “Have them ask my houseman about donad almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” In another email, Epstein offered “photso of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas urged: “I am serious man—for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there.”

so he’s a legend and stable normal genius guy who does normal down to earth things like watch the Olympics and hang out with people dressed for the beach

Thanks for the letter.

November 13, 2025 (Thursday)

We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.

That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion.

Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.

The administration has justified its violence against undocumented immigrants by insisting those they round up are violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” That claim is increasingly exposed as a lie, and Americans are pushing back.

Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica reported on the September 30 raid on an apartment complex in Chicago in which federal agents stormed the complex in a helicopter and military-style vehicles, broke into apartments, and marched individuals outside, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members and filming them for a video the administration circulated that portrayed them as criminals.

Government agents arrested 37 people in the raid but ultimately claimed that only two of them were gang members. The journalists spoke to one and found he had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone arrested in the raid. Instead, the journalists observed in immigration court that government lawyers never mentioned criminal charges or gang membership. Judges simply ordered them deported or let them leave voluntarily, which would enable them to apply to return to the U.S., a sign they are not actually seen as a threat to the country.

On Tuesday, Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported on the administration’s targeting of individuals who, until now, were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. President Barack Obama established DACA for those brought to the U.S. as children until Congress could pass legislation to give those “Dreamers” a path to legal residence. Thanks to the program, Dreamers by the hundreds of thousands gave the U.S. government their personal information in exchange for a promise they would not be deported. But Congress never acted, and now, in its quest to reach 3,000 deportations a day, the administration is targeting the DACA recipients, whose adherence to the rules the government established makes them easy to find and target.

Yesterday, Robert Tait of The Guardian noted that Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a group that monitors human rights in Latin American, report that the Veneuzelans the Trump administration sent to the infamous CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador endured systematic torture, including beatings and sexual violence. Only 3% of those the U.S. rendered to El Salvador had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S.

As immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.”

The executive director of Cristosal, Noah Bullock, accused the administration of wanting “to demonstrate and send a message of brutality.” A White House spokesperson said:: “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”

Today, retired Chicago broadcast journalists published a letter to people in the Chicago area saying what the federal government is doing to Chicago is “wrong.” It is “a brutal and illegal campaign against fellow Chicagoans, mainly Latinos: violent abductions, gutting families, using tear gas around children, roughing up witnesses, ramming cars and even taking a day care teacher from her school.” This “is not law enforcement,” they wrote; “it is terror.”

For the first time in twelve years, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a “Special Message” yesterday. Addressing the administration’s immigration enforcement policies, the bishops said they were “saddened by…the vilification of immigrants,” “concerned about the conditions in detention centers,” “troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and…hospitals and schools,” and “grieved” over the damage the immigration raids have done to families. “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people,” they wrote. “We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”

But the administration’s attempt to convince Americans to believe them, rather than their lyin’ eyes, doesn’t appear to be succeeding very well.

MAGA has been at least partly demoralized by the information coming out of the Epstein documents, with right-wing influencer Dinesh D’Souza, for example, defending Trump by saying: “Right now, we don’t have anyone else.” Trump media ally Stephen Bannon told supporters: “Trump’s…an imperfect instrument, but one infused by divine providence. Without him, we’d have nothing.”

Bloomberg reports that 62% of Americans they polled say the cost of everyday items has climbed over the past month and that 55% of employed Americans say they’re worried about losing their job. It also notes, as CNBC economic commenter Carl Quintanilla pointed out, that international stocks are outperforming the U.S. S&P stock index by the widest margin in 16 years. Yesterday the University of Michigan consumer confidence survey hit its lowest reading in 65 years.

Tonight Ana Swanson, Maggie Haberman, and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that the administration is attempting to lower food prices by preparing exemptions to tariffs, suggesting that some members of the administration are finally facing the fact that Trump’s fantasy ideology cannot defy reality forever.

Other administration officials are still clinging to their ideology. Although Colombia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have stopped sharing certain intelligence information with the U.S. because they consider the administration’s strikes on small boats illegal, Jennifer Jacobs and James LaPorta of CBS News reported today that senior military officials have presented Trump with options for land strikes in Venezuela.

Tonight, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media: “President Trump ordered action—and the Department of War is delivering. Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR.” “his mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood—and we will protect it.”

It appears that the administration is considering attacking another country under the pretext of stopping drug trafficking, in an echo of nineteenth-century imperial power that mimics the territorial ambitions of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

Political strategist Simon Rosenberg commented: “If Trump wags the dog in Venezuela it is going to do enormous damage to his already degraded brand here in the US. Zero support for this in the public. Will be seen for what it is— transparent attempt to rescue his flailing Presidency.”

‘They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.’

Riiiiiiiiiiiiight

“Trump’s…an imperfect instrument, but one infused by divine providence. Without him, we’d have nothing.”

God certainly let his/her/its standards drop

Cymek said:

“Trump’s…an imperfect instrument, but one infused by divine providence. Without him, we’d have nothing.”

God certainly let his/her/its standards drop

or its turds

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

“Trump’s…an imperfect instrument, but one infused by divine providence. Without him, we’d have nothing.”

God certainly let his/her/its standards drop

or its turds

That is even better

Thanks.

November 14, 2025 (Friday)

In a transparent attempt to distract from the many times his own name appears in the documents from the Epstein estate members of the House Oversight Committee released Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Democrats whose names appeared in the documents. He singled out former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and who is a Democratic donor.

Although the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and is supposed to be nonpartisan in protecting the rule of law, Bondi responded that the Department of Justice “will pursue this with urgency and integrity.” Maegan Vazquez and Shayna Jacobs of the Washington Post note that reporters have already covered the relationship of Epstein with Clinton, Summers, and Hoffman for years, and that in July, Justice Department officials said an examination of the FBI files relating to Epstein—a different cache than Wednesday’s—“did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

Meidas Touch noted: “In normal times, it would be a major scandal for the President to direct his AG to criminally investigate his political opponents to deflect from his own involvement in a major scandal—and for the AG to immediately announce she is doing it. The Epstein scandal and cover up just got even bigger.”

Earlier this week, the administration cited the food delivery app DoorDash as an authority on dropping consumer prices; today the city of Chicago announced a settlement in a four-year lawsuit charging that DoorDash took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to list restaurants without their permission and mark up food prices. DoorDash will pay $18 million in cash and credits to restaurants, delivery drivers, and consumers.

Trump has steadfastly and falsely maintained that foreign countries pay for tariffs. But today he signed an executive order ending tariffs on beef, coffee, bananas, cocoa, and other commodities from certain countries to lower prices after voters said they are concerned about the economy. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said the administration was “putting out a fire that they started and claiming it as progress.”

Trump has seemed particularly nervous that the Supreme Court might uphold the lower courts that have declared most of his tariffs illegal, reiterating that having to pay back tariff money would be “a National Security catastrophe.” Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) reminded Really American Media that Trump has been “using tariffs to enrich himself and his family,” using them—or the threat of them—to get golf course deals in countries around the world, as well as using them to punish countries Trump believes are hurting his right-wing allies.

In contrast, Trump’s administration is rewarding his ideological allies. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Argentina’s leader Javier Milei appears to have received more financial support from the U.S. government than the $20 billion more widely reported. The U.S. withdrew $870 million from its account at the International Monetary Fund shortly before a similar sum appeared in Argentina’s IMF fund just in time for that country to pay an $840 million debt. It is, one redditor noted, “turning into a scandal.”

News broke today that the Department of Justice is in talks with Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn to settle his $50 million claim against the government for damages related to the investigation into his conversations with a Russian operative before Trump took office. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and Trump later pardoned him. A federal judge dismissed Flynn’s lawsuit and the Biden administration fought it, but now the Trump administration appears to have engaged with Flynn over it.

Last week, Flynn suggested he might run for president in 2028 to keep the MAGA movement going.

Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported today that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s $220 million ad campaign, which she says is a crucial tool to stop undocumented immigration, has funneled $143 million to a company in Delaware called Safe America Media. The company lists the Virginia home of a Republican operative, Michael McElwain, as its address and was created days before contracts awarded to it were finalized.

One of the subcontractors who fulfilled a Safe America Media contract was the Strategy Group, whose chief executive officer, Ben Yoho, is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin. Noem’s top advisor, Corey Lewandowski, who introduced Noem to Yoho, has done significant work for the Strategy Group, and Noem used the Strategy Group for her 2022 campaign for South Dakota governor. Subcontractors are not listed in federal contracting databases.

The Department of Homeland Security skipped the normal competitive bidding process for its ad campaign, citing the need for “critical communications to the public” to go out quickly. Charles Tiefer, a former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and an expert on federal contract law, told Elliott, Kaplan, and Mierjeski, “It’s corrupt, is the word,” suggesting Noem was hiding her friends as subcontractors. He called for an investigation by the House Oversight Committee and the Homeland Security inspector general. That inspector general, Trump loyalist Joseph Cuffari, survived the January 2025 purge of inspectors general.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said career officials run its contracting and do it “by the book.”

William Turton and Christopher Bing of ProPublica reported today that FBI Director Kash Patel waived the standard polygraph exams required to obtain top security clearances for Deputy Director Dan Bongino and two other senior FBI staff members. The exam includes questions about foreign contacts, drug use, whether someone has a criminal history, and mishandling of classified information.

Like Patel himself, former right-wing podcaster Bongino had no prior experience at the FBI. The deputy director has access to the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which includes some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, including information from the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

Government officials told Turton and Bing that ascending to the FBI’s second-highest-ranking official without passing a standard background check is unprecedented.

A forthcoming book by reporter Olivia Nuzzi, about which the New York Times reported today, says that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a recovering heroin addict with whom she had a relationship, told her he uses psychedelics, despite claiming to have stopped using drugs decades ago.

Tonight Trump turned against those Republicans who voted in favor of the release of the Epstein files compiled by the FBI during its investigation of the sex offender. He announced he was “withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene,” and went after Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who introduced the discharge petition, calling him a “LOSER!”

Greene responded that Trump was “coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next weeks vote to release the Epstein files. It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level…. I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him even when almost all other Republicans turned their back and denounced him. But I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump.”

Tonight Aaron Rupar of Public Notice wrote: “I just don’t see how we can pretend even for a moment that anything involving our federal government is remotely normal when the president is covering up his involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. Like, what are we doing here”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (which was 25 years old yesterday—congratulations, Josh and the TPM folks!) wrote: “Investigate whoever he wants. Trumps drowning on every front.”

Thanks Neophyte. I checked earlier but she was a bit later posting today.

Thanks for posting the letter.

November 15, 2025 (Saturday)

A friend has asked for a picture tonight, and I’m happy to oblige. It’s been quite a week.

This one is a little different, but I loved how crisp the colors were in the autumn light.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Neophyte said:

November 15, 2025 (Saturday)

A friend has asked for a picture tonight, and I’m happy to oblige. It’s been quite a week.

This one is a little different, but I loved how crisp the colors were in the autumn light.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Soft-sediment deformation, caused by rapid deposition of an angular-clast granule-pebble conglomerate over soft mud-to silt-grade laminated shale.

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

November 15, 2025 (Saturday)

A friend has asked for a picture tonight, and I’m happy to oblige. It’s been quite a week.

This one is a little different, but I loved how crisp the colors were in the autumn light.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Soft-sediment deformation, caused by rapid deposition of an angular-clast granule-pebble conglomerate over soft mud-to silt-grade laminated shale.

Thanks.

November 16, 2025 (Sunday)

On Thursday, November 13, Michael Schmidt reported in the New York Times the story of the 17-year-old girl the House Ethics Committee found former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) likely paid to have sex with him. The girl was a homeless high schooler who needed to supplement the money she made from her job at McDonald’s to be able to pay for braces.

Through a “sugar dating” website that connected older men with younger women, she met Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, who introduced her to Gaetz. Both men allegedly took drugs with her and paid her for sex, allegedly including at a party at the home of a former Republican member of the Florida legislature, Chris Dorworth.

The Justice Department charged Greenberg with sex trafficking a minor and having sex with a minor in exchange for money. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a decade in prison. The Justice Department did not charge Gaetz. In 2022 the girl’s lawyers asked Gaetz and Dorworth about reaching a financial settlement with her. She didn’t sue, but Dorworth sued her, sparking depositions and disclosure of evidence. Dorworth dropped the case. That material has recently been released and made up some of Schmidt’s portrait of the girl.

Schmidt’s story added another window into the world depicted in the more than 20,000 documents the House Oversight Committee dropped from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein the day before. Those emails show a network of elite people—mostly but not exclusively men—from politics, business, academia, foreign leadership, and entertainment who continued to seek chummy access to the wealthy Epstein, the information he retailed, and his contacts despite his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

When accusations against Epstein resurfaced in 2018, along with public outrage over the sweetheart deal he received in 2008 from former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta—who in 2018 was secretary of labor in Trump’s first administration—Trump ally Stephen Bannon worked together to combat the story. As Jason Wilson of The Guardian notes, Epstein and Bannon treated the crisis as a publicity problem to fix as they pushed Bannon’s right-wing agenda and supported Trump.

As David Smith of The Guardian put it, Epstein’s in-box painted a picture of “a world where immense wealth, privileged access and proximity to power can insulate individuals from accountability and consequences. For those inside the circle, the rules of the outside world do not apply.”

On Tuesday, November 4, Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Washington Post described the ideology behind this world. She profiled Chris Buskirk of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization funded by tech leaders to create a network that will permit the MAGA movement to outlive Trump. Dwoskin wrote that political strategists credit the Rockbridge Network with pushing J.D. Vance—one of the network’s members—into the vice presidency.

Dwoskin explains that Buskirk embraces a theory that says “a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward.” Such an “aristocracy”—as he described his vision to Dwoskin—drives innovation. It would be “a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers.” When he’s not working in politics, Buskirk is, according to Dwoskin, pushing “unrestrained capitalism into American life.” The government should support the country’s innovators, network members say.

We have heard this ideology before.

In 1858, in a period in which a few fabulously wealthy elite enslavers in the American South were trying to take over the government and create their own oligarchy, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues that “democracy” meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them. Society worked best, he said, when it was run by natural leaders: the wealthy, educated, well-connected men who made up the South’s planter class.

Hammond explained that society was naturally made up of a great mass of workers, rather dull people, but happy and loyal, whom he called “mudsills” after the timbers driven into the ground to support elegant homes above. These mudsills supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement,” one that modeled itself on the British aristocracy. The mudsills needed the guidance of their betters to produce goods that would create capital, Hammond said. That capital would be wasted if it stayed among the mudsills; it needed to move upward, where better men would use it to move society forward.

Hammond’s ideology gave us the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court found that Black Americans “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”

In 1889, during the Gilded Age, industrialist Andrew Carnegie embraced a similar idea when he explained that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few was not only inevitable in an industrial system, but was beneficial. The wealthy were stewards of society’s money, administering it for the common good by funding libraries, schools, and so on, to uplift everyone, rather than permitting individual workers to squander it in frivolity. It was imperative, Carnegie thought, for the government to protect big business for the benefit of the country as a whole.

Carnegie’s ideology gave us the 1905 Lochner v. New York Supreme Court decision declaring that states could not require employers to limit workers’ hours in a bakery to 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. The court reasoned that there was no need of such a law for workers’ welfare or safety because “there is no danger to the employ in a first-class bakery.” The court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protected “freedom of contract”: the right of employers to contract with laborers at any price and for any hours the workers could be induced to accept.

In 1929, after the Great Crash tore the bottom out of the economy, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon did not blame the systemic inequality his policies had built into the economy. He blamed lazy Americans and the government that had served greedy constituencies. He told President Herbert Hoover not to interfere to help the country.

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

Mellon’s ideology gave us “Hoovervilles”—shantytowns built from packing boxes and other salvaged materials—and the Great Depression.

Today, an ideology of “aristocracy” justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach, while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior.

Yesterday Arian Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion. Campo-Flores outlined a world in which the “ultrarich” are living in luxury and increasingly sealed off from everyday people. “They don’t wait in lines. They don’t jostle with airport crowds or idle unnecessarily in traffic,” Campo-Flores writes. “Instead, an ecosystem of exclusive restaurants, clubs, resorts and other service providers delivers them customized and exquisite experiences as fast as possible. The spaces they inhabit are often private, carefully curated and populated by like-minded and similarly well-heeled peers.”

On the other end of the spectrum is the Trump administration’s crusade against not just undocumented immigrants but also against legal immigrants and darker-skinned Americans in general.

But using the power of the state against those outside the “aristocracy” is more widespread than attacks on Brown Americans. Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle reported on October 29 in the New York Times that the future of Trump’s policy for criminalizing unhoused people is taking shape in Utah. On the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the state is building a facility where it will commit 1,300 inmates. Refocusing homeless initiatives from providing housing toward rehabilitation and moral development, the involuntary confinement will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness” and guide homeless people “towards human thriving” through social and addiction services, according to political appointee Randy Shumway, who chairs the state’s Homeless Services Board and whose business promotes software used in case management for unhoused people.

Critics note that funds are not currently available for those seeking such services, and with the Republicans’ deep cuts to Medicaid it’s hard to see where more funding will come from, although at least some of it is being redirected from currently-operating housing programs.

On November 6 the Supreme Court reinstated a Trump policy requiring all new passports to reflect a person’s biological sex at birth. As Steve Vladeck explained in One First, from 1992 to 2010 the State Department had allowed people who had undergone surgical reassignment to change their identification on their passports; from 2010 to 2025 they could submit a certificate from a doctor saying they had undergone clinical treatment for gender transition.

When he took office on January 20, Trump issued an executive order overturning this 33-year policy, saying “t is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” which it defined as “an individual’s immutable biological classification” as assigned “at conception.” Transgender identity, the order said, is “false” and “corrosive” to the country. Plaintiffs led by Ashton Orr sued, and on April 18 U.S. District Judge Julia E. Kobick granted a motion to make the case a class action. She also granted a stay, finding that the plaintiffs would likely win on the merits of their claim that the new policy violates their right to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. The administration went to the Supreme Court for emergency relief.

In Trump v. Orr the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court reinstated Trump’s policy, writing: “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.” In addition to using a passport to travel, transgender Americans who live in states that don’t recognize their transition often use their passports as identification in the U.S. On Friday the State Department updated its website, committing to the new policy that effectively erases those people and forces them to conform to the MAGA ideology.

In 1858, the year after the Dred Scott decision, rising politician Abraham Lincoln explained to an audience in Chicago what a system that set some people above others meant. Arguments that those deemed “inferior” “are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow…are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” he said. “hey always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. argument…is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”

“Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”

In Lincoln’s day, and in the Gilded Age, and in the 1930s, Americans pushed back against those trying to establish an aristocracy in the United States. That project appears to be gaining speed as well in today’s America, where the rich and powerful are increasingly operating in cryptocurrencies and avoiding accountability, but where a majority of people would prefer to live in a world where a child does not have to sell her body to older men in order to save enough money to get braces on her teeth.

Thanks.

Sending homeless people to jails, where they will learn to not be homeless reminds me of sending Uyghurs to jails where they will lean to be Han.

MAGA isn’t possible

They really mean a USA that existed at the height of the Cold War.
Powerful and everyone followed their lead without question.
Not this bloated empire in decay that elected a megalomaniac to restore a fantasy.

They aren’t weak of course but aren’t an example for anyone else to follow.

November 17, 2025 (Monday)

President Donald J. Trump spent the weekend flooding social media with posts claiming that his economic policies are working and that his 34 felony convictions and the investigations into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russian operatives were illegitimate, and posting angrily about those people calling out his association with Jeffrey Epstein. He even reposted a statement from one of his own lawyers saying, “If Jeffrey Epstein had any dirt on Donald Trump, he would have had great leverage in the criminal case against him at the time he died,” which perhaps conveys a different message than he intended.

Then, after fighting furiously against the upcoming House vote over releasing the Epstein files the FBI collected as part of its investigation into the convicted sex abuser, at 9:15 p.m. last night Trump abruptly reversed course, saying that House Republicans should vote in favor of releasing the files “because we have nothing to hide.” “I DON’T CARE!” he posted.”

But of course, he does care, as is evident from how deeply he fought the release of the files the FBI collected during its investigation of Epstein right up until the final signature on the House discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a measure to require the Justice Department to release the files. As Meredith Kile of People magazine reported, when a female Bloomberg reporter at a press gaggle aboard Air Force One November 14 asked him if there was anything “incriminating” in the Epstein files, he pointed a finger in her face and said: “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy.”

In the hours before House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) swore in Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) at 4:00 on Wednesday, Trump and his loyalists worked to pressure Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to remove her name from the discharge petition. She refused. As soon as Johnson swore her into office, Grijalva signed the petition, teeing up a vote on a bill requiring the release of the files.

On Thursday, November 13, the people behind the White House social media account seemed to be trying to combat the Epstein story by pushing the image of Trump as a happily married family man. The account posted an image of Trump and First Lady Melania Trump listening to the U.S. Marine Band and chatting, then a video of Trump behind the Oval Office desk, giving a medallion and a pen each to four small children. The caption read, “The best president,” with a heart emoji.

On Friday, November 14, the White House social media account posted an image of Trump and the First Lady embracing under the caption “I can’t help falling in love with you,” along with an emoji of musical notes and a heart. On Sunday, November 16, it posted a picture of the two of them striding toward the cameras holding hands, under the caption “America’s power couple,” with an eagle and an American flag emoji.

That Trump’s hand is weakening showed on Friday, when the leader of the Indiana Senate announced that it would not hold a meeting in December to gerrymander all nine of Indiana’s districts to favor Republicans. Currently, the Indiana delegation to the House of Representatives has seven Republicans and two Democrats. Trump and Indiana governor Mike Braun have put great pressure on the legislature to redistrict, but even though Republicans hold a supermajority in the Indiana legislature, not enough Republican senators are willing to face the anger of voters to back the plan.

Then, over the weekend, rumors spread that as many as 100 House Republicans would vote in favor of the measure. Their constituents are eager for the release of the files, which Trump promised on the campaign trail, and the material already released from the Epstein estate has been damaging enough that representatives have reason to worry whether the material in the FBI files is even worse, leaving them in the position of having defended that behavior if they continue to cover it up. On Sunday, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Jonathan Karl of ABC News’s “This Week” that he was hoping to get a veto-proof majority in favor of the release.

The signs were clear: Trump had lost control of the House Republicans.

This is a big deal. The public outrage over ABC’s suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show in September demonstrated in a much more public way than court losses had that the administration was not all-powerful. That outcry forced first ABC’s parent company, Disney, and then broadcast station owners Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group to backtrack and to reinstate Kimmel’s show.

While individual Republican lawmakers have groused about one or another of the administration’s actions, only a few have broken with Trump. He has generally been able to command loyalty by threatening to sic his supporters on those who step out of line and by warning that he will support primary challengers against them. Notably, over the weekend he hammered at one of those lawmakers, his former loyalist Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), calling her a traitor, “wacky,” and a “ranting Lunatic.” He said he was withdrawing his endorsement of her and would support another Republican to replace her.

His usual threats didn’t work; dozens of House Republicans still said they were going to vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files. So to get back in front of the party, Trump suddenly called for lawmakers to pass the measure, later telling reporters he would sign it if it came to his desk. Lawmakers who just hours before had maintained they would vote no suddenly switched to yes, indicating that Trump still commands many of them.

But his change in direction makes it far more likely senators, too, will vote to pass the bill. Tonight Trump loyalist Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said he would vote for the measure, likely realizing a vote against it will hurt him in his upcoming campaign for governor, which is quite something considering Alabama’s previously strong support for Trump.

Don’t hold your breath for the release of the files, though: Trump’s post saying he didn’t care about the release included the qualification that “the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to,” suggesting he will continue his stonewalling with the help of the Department of Justice. Remember: all the congressional machinations are only to force the release of the files. He could release them himself any time he wanted to.

On Sunday, Trump posted angrily about the Indiana Republicans’ failure to do his bidding, calling those Republican opponents of redistricting “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only, and accusing them of “depriving Republicans of a Majority in the House, A VERY BIG DEAL!” He went on: “It’s weak ‘Republicans’ that cause our Country such problems—It’s why we have crazy Policies and Ideas that are so bad for America.” He blamed Braun for “not working the way he should to get the necessary Votes,” and said “Any Republican that votes against this important redistricting, potentially having an impact on America itself, should be PRIMARIED.” He singled out two senators—one of whom had not publicly said he opposed the bill—saying if they didn’t “DO THEIR JOB, AND DO IT NOW!…, let’s get them out of office, ASAP.”

Hours later, one of the senators was the victim of a “swatting” incident, in which the police department received an email falsely saying someone in the home had been harmed, a malicious action designed to prompt police to launch a massive response to a potentially dangerous situation, thus putting the victims in danger.

Trump seems to be losing his iron grip onthe Republican Party. Although Steve Peoples of the Associated Press reported yesterday that White House officials and other Washington, D.C., leaders say there is no affordability problem in the country, Trump is popular, and the way to win in 2026 is to stick with him, not everyone is so sure, especially after the party’s big losses earlier this month in elections across the country.

On Monday, November 11, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham pushed Trump on issues that have cost him support. Although consumers have expressed concern over rising prices, Trump insisted prices are “way down.” Ingraham asked: “Are you saying voters are misperceiving how they feel?” She took on the administration’s recent call to address housing costs by issuing 50-year mortgages, noting that the proposal “has enraged your MAGA friends,” who recognize that such a mortgage would benefit banks over buyers and nearly double the time it would take for Americans to own a home.

“Don’t forget, MAGA was my idea,” Trump defended himself. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else, and MAGA wants to see our country thrive.”

Yesterday Trump defended right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, who has been under fire for his interview platforming white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes traffics in racism and sexism and has openly admired Hitler, insisting that many of the Republicans currently in office are too moderate. When the head of the Heritage Foundation, once thought of as the intellectual heart of the modern Republican Party, supported Carlson, at least six people resigned from the foundation, expressing dismay at the direction it was taking.

Today Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) announced that a bipartisan bill to repeal Trump’s executive order stripping the union rights from federal workers now has enough votes on a discharge petition to bring it before the House. Golden and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) introduced the bill in April, but Johnson refused to bring it up. In June, Golden launched a discharge petition to force it to the floor.

Democrats and three Republicans signed the petition, but it was still two votes short of adoption. Today, Republican lawmakers Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler of New York signed it, bringing the number of signatures on the petition to 218. Enough Republican members have joined with the Democrats to override Johnson and challenge Trump’s executive order.

November 18, 2025 (Tuesday)

For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.

A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.

They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.

And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.

On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began. While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their enslaved Black neighbors—Lincoln dated the nation from the Declaration of Independence.

The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed to be “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”

He noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”

“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

November 19, 2025 (Wednesday)

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This measure gives the Department of Justice 30 days to release the files the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected when investigating the late sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The vote was 427 to 1, with Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA) casting the only nay vote. After the vote, Epstein survivors in the galleries cheered.

The strong vote in favor came after President Donald J. Trump, after trying to kill the release of the Epstein files for months, on Sunday night suddenly reversed course. After failing to stop dozens of House Republicans from giving their support to the measure, he said he didn’t care if it passed, starting a stampede of Republicans eager to be on the popular side of the issue.

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) evidently went along with this strategy because he expected Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) to stall the measure with amendments. If it finally passed nonetheless, the House would have to take it up again and could delay it further. After the House passed the bill, Johnson told reporters he would “insist upon” amendments.

But Thune was not inclined to play along. Johnson has been openly doing Trump’s bidding and jamming the Senate to force it to comply, and Thune appears to have had enough. Before the measure went to the Senate, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer asked for unanimous consent to pass the measure when it arrived. The Senate agreed, and thus the bill passed the Senate automatically by a unanimous vote in favor.

On social media, Just Jack posted: “Anytime you’re feeling embarrassed, remember that Clay Higgins woke up this morning to the realization he was the only one in the whole *ss Congress who voted to defend pedophiles.”

Mike Johnson did not take the news of the Senate passage particularly well, telling MS NOW congressional reporter Mychael Schnell: “I am deeply disappointed in this outcome…. It needed amendments. I just spoke to the president about that. We’ll see what happens.” Johnson said both he and the president “have concerns” about the bill.

Trump seemed to sense last night that the jig was up. “I don’t care when the Senate passes the House Bill,” he wrote in the early evening. “Whether tonight, or at some other time in the near future, I just don’t want Republicans to take their eyes off all the Victories that we’ve had….” He went on to record his usual list of exaggerations and fantasy successes, but the message seemed as if he was acknowledging defeat. Tonight, in the midst of another long rant on social media, Trump announced: “I HAVE JUST SIGNED THE BILL TO RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!”

Meanwhile, those combing through the files from Epstein’s estate released by the House Oversight Committee last week are turning up more disturbing information. Just a week before his arrest in 2019, Epstein wrote to Trump ally Steve Bannon: “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”

Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the horrors around Epstein will not be made easier by news reported yesterday by Robert Faturechi and Avi Asher-Schapiro of ProPublica that the Trump White House intervened to make Customs and Border Protection return the electronic devices they seized from accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan when they arrived in Florida earlier this year. The two have been accused of sex trafficking in Romania and the U.K.

Today Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Department of Justice would release the files within 30 days as the law requires, but suggested the administration might try to bottle up the files because, at Trump’s demand, she opened an investigation into the Democrats named in them. She told reporters that she couldn’t comment on that investigation because “it is a pending investigation.”

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday showed Trump’s job approval rating has fallen another two percentage points since a similar poll in early November. A Marist poll released today shows that registered voters prefer Democrats to Republicans on a generic ballot for the 2026 midterms by an astonishing 14%. In November 2024, voters’ preference was divided evenly: 48% to 48%.

Trump’s hope of rigging the 2026 midterm elections took another hit yesterday when a panel of three federal judges said Texas could not use the new, mid-decade district map Trump demanded to shift five Democratic-dominated districts to Republican domination. In the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, the Supreme Court said that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering, and so the Texas Republicans who redrew the districts insisted their gerrymandering was strictly about partisanship.

But two judges disagreed. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote that “ubstantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.” Texas House minority leader Gene Wu, who led the Democratic lawmakers’ August walkout to prevent the redistricting, said the decision stopped “one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen.”

Texas immediately appealed to the Supreme Court.

This afternoon the third judge, 79-year-old Reagan appointee Jerry Smith, released a scathing dissent, attacking Judge Brown personally and writing that “he main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom.”

The administration faced not just a loss but embarrassment in the Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI director James Comey. Trump holds a grudge against Comey, who in 2017 refused to drop an investigation into Trump’s then-national security advisor Mike Flynn’s contacts with a Russian operative shortly before Trump took office.

In September of this year, then–U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Maryland Erik Seibert, a career prosecutor, said there was insufficient evidence for an indictment against Comey. Under pressure from Trump, Siebert resigned on September 19. The next day, the president posted on social media a message to Bondi that he apparently intended to be a private message, demanding the Justice Department indict Comey and others. That night, Trump appointed Lindsay Halligan, a White House aide who had no experience as a prosecutor, to replace Seibert; the legality of her appointment is being challenged in court.

Days later, Halligan returned a grand jury indictment against Comey for obstruction of justice and making false statements to Congress. Comey pleaded not guilty, his lawyers arguing that the charges were an act of vindictive prosecution by the president.

As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, in the process of working through some of the disagreements between the parties before trial in front of Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, it emerged that the government had ignored rules for gathering evidence and also that Halligan appeared to have misled the grand jury, suggesting the grand jurors could “be assured the government has more evidence, perhaps better evidence,” than it had shown them. Vance called this “staggeringly wrong.” It also appeared that Halligan may have misled the jury by suggesting that Comey had to prove he was not guilty, when the actual requirement in a criminal case is that the government has to prove a defendant’s guilt.

Fitzpatrick also noted irregularities in the grand jury proceedings. As David French explained in the New York Times, Halligan initially tried to get an indictment on three counts, but the jury refused one of the charges. Somehow, Halligan signed two different indictments. The first “indicated that the grand jury failed to find probable cause as to any count,” and the second had two, rather than three, charges.

Today, in a hearing to consider whether Trump was prosecuting Comey vindictively, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Nachmanoff questioned Halligan herself, who admitted she had shown the final Comey indictment not to the whole grand jury but to only two of the grand jurors. Then one of the lawyers working with Halligan told the judge that the prosecutors who had handled the case before Halligan had drafted a memo explaining why they would not prosecute Comey. He noted that someone in the deputy attorney general’s office told him not to admit that information in court.

Comey’s lawyer, Michael Dreeben, is a national expert on criminal law who, in his time at the solicitor general’s office, represented the United States before the Supreme Court more than a hundred times. Dreeben urged the judge to throw out the case and strike a blow at Trump’s use of the criminal justice system to attack his perceived enemies.
Dreeben told the judge: “This has to stop.”

Thanks.

November 20, 2025 (Thursday)

Trump spent this morning calling a group of military veterans in Congress traitors and saying they “should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” Their crime, in Trump’s eyes, was their release Tuesday of a video reminding military and intelligence officers that they must refuse illegal orders.

The video features Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and Representatives Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), and Jason Crow (D-CO). Slotkin is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. Kelly was a captain in the U.S. Navy. Deluzio served in the U.S. Navy. Goodlander is a former intelligence officer. Houlahan served in the Air Force. Crow is a former paratrooper and Army Ranger.

Speaking in turns in the video, the lawmakers say: “We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community who take risks each day to keep Americans safe. We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military, but that trust is at risk. This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.

“Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders; you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army, our Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical.”

“Know that we have your back, because now, more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans.

They end with the famous line delivered by Captain James Lawrence, who commanded USS Chesapeake in 1813 when it engaged in a naval battle with HMS Shannon during the War of 1812. In the battle, Lawrence was mortally wounded. As his men carried him below, he ordered:

“Don’t give up the ship.”

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller promptly posted on social media, “Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection,” but Trump did not appear to notice the video yesterday when he was entertaining Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, known as MBS, at the White House. But something had called his attention to it by last night—perhaps Crow’s appearance on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News Channel show last night in which his advocacy for the military appeared to throw her off balance.

Trump reposted comments from a Washington Examiner article about the video that called for the lawmakers to be arrested, “thrown out of their offices,” “frog marched out of their homes at 3:00 AM with FOX News cameras filming the whole thing,” and “charged with sedition.” He reposted “Insurrection. TREASON!” and a message from a user who wrote: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

At 9:08 this morning, Trump posted, “It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand—We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET. President DJT”

At 9:17 he reposted the Washington Examiner article with the note: “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT”

At 10:21 he posted: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

And so, an American president called for the arrest and execution of elected lawmakers.

Restating the law is not sedition, and Fox News Channel legal analyst Andy McCarthy promptly wrote: “There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required. That is all.”

Professor of the early American republic Joanne Freeman wrote that she was “ot going to repost DJT’s howling threats against Democratic lawmakers. I’ll just say: 1. We still have free speech here. 2. People can still oppose the president. 3. No—George Washington wouldn’t have hanged the lawmakers because HE WAS VERY CAREFUL TO STAY STRICTLY WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF HIS OFFICE AS PRESIDENT. He didn’t want to be a king or dictator. Plus, he was in his right mind.”

By noon, the White House was doing cleanup. At 1:58, CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe reported from Reuters: “TRUMP DOES NOT WANT TO EXECUTE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS, WHITE HOUSE SAYS,” an astonishing sentence to see coming from the government of the United States of America.

Hours later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to defuse the crisis of the president calling for the execution of members of Congress by claiming the Democratic lawmakers were the ones encouraging violence. When asked about it, Leavitt said, “They are literally saying to 1.3 million active duty service members to defy the chain of command, not to follow lawful orders.” A reporter interrupted: “Actually, they said…illegal orders.” Leavitt claimed, “They’re suggesting…that the president has given illegal orders, which he has not. Every single order that has given to this United States military by this commander-in-chief and through this chain of command through the secretary of war is lawful.”

In fact, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported yesterday that the senior judge advocate general, or JAG, at U.S. Southern Command in Miami, the command that oversees the U.S. strikes on the small boats near Venezuela, expressed concern that the 82 deaths from the strikes were extrajudicial killings. If so, they would expose service members participating in the operations to legal repercussions.

According to the reporters, the opinion of a command’s top JAG on the legality of a military operation typically would determine whether the operation went forward. It is possible for higher officials to overrule their findings, but their concerns are typically addressed before the operation begins. In this case, though, the reporters write, officials at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department and other senior government officials overruled the JAG.

This new information adds fuel to the concerns of lawyers and lawmakers of both parties about the legality of the boat strikes just as lawmakers are pushing back on the administration’s refusal to honor the 1973 War Powers Act that requires the president to get Congress’s permission to continue strikes for more than 60 days. That deadline passed on November 2, and now the administration appears to be considering a broader assault on Venezuela.

On Tuesday, November 18, Representatives Gregory Meeks (D-NY), top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Adam Smith (D-WA), top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee; Jim Himes (D-CT), top Democrat of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; Bennie Thompson (D-MS), top Democrat of the House Homeland Security Committee; Jason Crow (D-CO), top Democrat of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations; and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced a War Powers Resolution to stop the administration, as they said, “from continuing to use U.S. Armed Forces to conduct strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, operations the administration has carried out for more than 60 days without congressional authorization.”

In the last week, Trump’s iron grip on congressional Republicans has appeared to be slipping. All but one member of Congress voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and then enough Republicans crossed the aisle to sign a second discharge petition to force a House vote on a bipartisan bill to repeal Trump’s executive order stripping union protections from federal workers. If there is anything but a demand for absolute power behind his insistence that Democrats are traitors, it might be a hope of winning wavering Republicans away from budding bipartisanship and back to his MAGA standard.
Some Trump loyalists did indeed jump to the president’s defense. More stayed silent.

After Trump’s threats, the six lawmakers who made the video—Slotkin, Kelly, Deluzio, Goodlander, Houlahan, and Crow—issued a statement:
“We are veterans and national security professionals who love this country and swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. No threat, intimidation, or call for violence will deter us from that sacred obligation.

“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.

“But this isn’t about any one of us. This isn’t about politics. This is about who we are as Americans. Every American must unite and condemn the President’s calls for our murder and political violence. This is a time for moral clarity.

“In these moments, fear is contagious, but so is courage. We will continue to lead and will not be intimidated.

“Don’t Give Up the Ship!”

Thanks for posting this letter.

November 21, 2025 (Friday)

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Ukrainian people today. The current moment, he said, is “one of the most difficult” for the country.

“Ukraine may soon face an extremely difficult choice. Either the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner. Either 28 complicated points or the hardest winter yet—and the risks that follow,” Zelensky said.

Zelensky’s use of the word “dignity” recalled Ukraine’s 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Russian-aligned president Viktor Yanukovych and turned the country toward Europe.

Zelensky was responding to a 28-point “peace” plan President Donald J. Trump is pressuring him to sign before Thanksgiving, November 27. The plan appears to have been leaked to Barak Ravid of Axios by Kirill Dmitriev, a top ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and reports say it was worked out by Dmitriev and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff. Ukrainian representatives and representatives from Europe were not included. Laura Kelly of The Hill reported on Wednesday that Congress was blindsided by the proposal, which Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet of The Hill suggest Russia may be pushing now to take advantage of a corruption scandal roiling Ukraine’s government.

Luke Harding of The Guardian noted that the plan appears to have been translated from Russian, as many of the phrases in the text read naturally in that language but are awkward and clunky in English.

The plan is a Russian wish list. It begins by confirming Ukraine’s sovereignty, a promise Russia gave Ukraine in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons but then broke when it invaded Ukraine in 2014.

The plan gives Crimea and most of the territory in Ukraine’s four eastern oblasts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk to Russia, and it limits the size of the Ukrainian military.

It erases any and all accountability for the Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, including well-documented rape, torture, and murder. It says: “All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.”

It calls for $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to be invested in rebuilding and developing Ukraine. Since the regions that need reconstruction are the ones Russia would be taking, this means that Russian assets would go back to Russia. The deal says that Europe, which was not consulted, will unfreeze Russian assets and itself add another $100 billion to the reconstruction fund. The plan says the U.S. “will receive 50 percent of the profits from this venture,” which appears to mean that Europe will foot the bill for the reconstruction of Ukraine—Russia, if the plan goes through—and the U.S. and Russia will split the proceeds.

The plan asserts that “Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy,” with sanctions lifted and an invitation to rejoin the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of countries with advanced economies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union—that meets every year to discuss global issues. Russia was excluded from the group after it invaded Ukraine in 2014, and Putin has wanted back in.

According to the plan, Russia and “he US will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”

The plan requires Ukraine to amend its constitution to reject membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It says “ dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the US, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.”

Not only does this agreement sell out Ukraine and Europe for the benefit of Russia—which attacked Ukraine—it explicitly separates the U.S. from NATO, a long-time goal of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

NATO grew out of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. They agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.

The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, communism backed by the Soviet Union began to push east into Europe. In 1949, France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a military and economic alliance, the Western Union, to work together, but nations understood that resisting Soviet aggression, preventing the revival of European militarism, and guaranteeing international cooperation would require a transatlantic security agreement.

In 1949 the countries of the Western Union joined with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”

They did so in the face of Russian aggression.

Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 after Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych, earning economic sanctions and expulsion from what was then the G8. But Crimea wasn’t enough: he wanted Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, the country’s industrial heartland. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the U.S. presidency against Donald Trump in 2016, would never stand for that land grab. But Trump was a different story.

According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in summer 2016, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort discussed with his business partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, “a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, the plan was for Trump to say he wanted peace in Ukraine and for him to appoint Manafort to be a “special representative” to manage the process. With the cooperation of Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian officials, Manafort would help create “an autonomous republic” in Ukraine’s industrialized eastern region and would work to have Russian-backed Yanukovych, for whom Manafort had worked previously, “elected to head that republic.”

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Putin has been determined to control that land ever since. And now it appears Russia is pushing Trump to deliver it.

This plan, complete with its suggestion that the U.S. is no longer truly a part of NATO but can broker between NATO and Russia, would replace the post–World War II rules-based international order with a new version of an older order. In the world before NATO and the other international institutions that were created after World War II, powerful countries dominated smaller countries, which had to do as their powerful neighbors demanded in order to survive.

November 22, 2025 (Saturday)

On Tuesday, six Democratic lawmakers, themselves veterans of the U.S. military or intelligence services, released a video telling service members that they would stand behind them as they refused to obey unlawful orders.

On Thursday, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media that the message in the video was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand—We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.” He followed that post with another saying: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He has continued to attack the lawmakers over the past two days.

For the president of the United States of America to call elected lawmakers traitors and demand they be arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for making statements he perceives as threats to his policies is bizarre, outrageous, and anti-American. But it is not unprecedented.

In 1866, President Andrew Johnson accused Republicans of trying to overthrow the government, called congressmen traitors, and called for them to be hanged.

A former tailor from Tennessee, Johnson considered himself the representative of poor white men who he believed had been crushed before the Civil War by the elite southern enslavers who dominated the economy. Johnson opposed their rising oligarchy, but that did not mean he had any interest in protecting the rights—or even the lives—of formerly enslaved Black Americans.

Johnson was a southern Democrat who hated the congressional Republicans who wanted to protect Black rights and rebuild the nation on the basis of free labor. He thought they were expanding the federal government mostly to keep their party in power permanently, while the taxes their new bureaucracy required to protect Black Americans would destroy poor whites by raising taxes.

Elevated to the White House by the death of President Abraham Lincoln, Johnson intended to “restore” the Union much as it had been before the war except for the abolition of enslavement, an abolition he strongly supported because he believed slavery was what had enabled elite southern planters to amass their fortunes. Because Congress had adjourned in March and was not scheduled to reconvene until the following December, Johnson had free rein for eight months to rebuild the nation as he wished.

In summer 1865 he told the governors of the former Confederate states to organize new constitutional conventions and then he required those conventions to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, ending human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for crime, nullify the ordinance of secession, and repudiate the Confederate war debts, essentially defaulting on loans so that future rebels would find it hard to raise money to fund their rebellion.

They did so—more or less—but then went on to pass “Black Codes,” laws that differed from state to state but that generally pushed Black Americans back into subservience to their white neighbors. The codes bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working for white men, prohibited them from owning guns or gathering in groups, demanded submissive behavior, and permitted corporal punishment for those failing to obey the codes.

Black Americans had no right to vote to challenge these laws, and no right to sit on juries or to testify in court. So they were at the mercy of any white man who cheated them or any gang that raped, assaulted, or murdered freed people.

When southern states held elections to send representatives to Congress in fall 1865, voters reelected old leaders who had led the South out of the Union in 1861, including Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the former vice president of the Confederacy. In late November 1865, these southern leaders traveled to Washington, D.C., to take their seats in Congress.

On December 4, Johnson greeted the new Congress by congratulating it that Reconstruction was over. While congress members had been out of session, he explained, he had reorganized the former Confederate states. All that was left to do to restore the government was for Congress to seat the South’s representatives. They were already in Washington, D.C., marveling at the changes the war had wrought in what was, just four years before, a sleepy southern town.

Republicans were appalled by Johnson’s “restoration,” recognizing that it delivered Black Americans who had fought for the United States into the hands of those men who had fought to destroy it. Johnson was permitting southerners who had lost the war to win the peace. The Chicago Tribune declared: “The men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog-pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.”

Congress rejected Johnson’s solution to reconstruct the nation. There was no way northern lawmakers were going to rebuild southern society on the old, pre–Civil War blueprint, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states even more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it.

Congress refused to seat the southern delegates. Then, to come up with their own plan for reconstruction, congressmen appointed a committee of thirteen lawmakers as the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. After months of hearings and deliberation, the committee proposed to reconstruct the nation on an entirely new basis. At the end of April 1866, it called for amending the Constitution for the fourteenth time.

The wrote an amendment that began by reiterating the Constitution had provided that “ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This was an explicit rejection of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that denied Black Americans could be U.S. citizens.

Then it said: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This outlawed the discriminatory laws put in place in southern states under the Black Codes and said the federal government would guarantee that states could not pass legislation that gave some citizens more rights than others.

The new amendment gave Congress the power to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provision of this article.”

Congress required southern states to ratify the amendment before being readmitted to the Union.

Johnson hated the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. He hated its broad definition of citizenship; he hated its protection of equal rights within the states; he hated its assertion of the power of the federal government to protect that equality.

So Johnson told southern politicians to ignore Congress’s order to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. He assured them that Democrats would win the 1866 midterm elections and that once back in power, Democrats could repudiate Republican “radicalism” and allow Johnson’s plan for reconstruction of the Union to proceed.

Johnson’s position energized ex-Confederates, who made the summer of 1866 a bloody one. In July, when a Unionist convention in New Orleans called for taking the vote away from former Confederates and giving it to loyal Black Americans, white mobs attacked the building where the convention was in session. The ensuing riots killed thirty-seven Black delegates and three white delegates to the convention.

Rather than condemning the violence in the South, Johnson egged it on. After denouncing Congress as an illegal body—because it had not seated southern representatives— and saying Republican lawmakers were trying to undermine the Constitution, he decided to rally voters to his side before the 1866 midterm elections with a speaking campaign. In August 1866 he set out on a “Swing Around the Circle,” speaking at rallies on a circuit from Washington to New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and back through the Ohio River valley to the capital.

In February, shortly after congressional Republicans had rejected his plan for reconstruction, Johnson had suggested that those Republicans were trying to overthrow the government and were no better than the Confederates. But on September 4, 1866, he went further. In Cleveland, Ohio, facing a crowd heckling him for his stand against Congress, Johnson called those who opposed his plan for reconstruction “traitors” and suggested they should be hanged.

It was a stunning moment. Just a year after the end of the devastating civil war, a president had called for hanging members of Congress because they did not support his policies.

Americans wanted no part of it. Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand control of the country to the former Confederates rioting in the South and a president who called for the hanging of congressmen. Rather than rebuking the Republicans in the midterm elections as Johnson had predicted, voters repudiated Johnson. They stood behind the principles in the Fourteenth Amendment and gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress.

Now firmly in control of rebuilding the South, the Republicans worked to make the Fourteenth Amendment a reality. But in every southern state other than Tennessee (where locals so hated their native son Johnson that they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment just to spite him), white men had ignored Congress’s plan for reconstruction.

So, on March 2, 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten unreconstructed southern states into five military districts and, as Johnson’s plan had done, required new constitutional conventions to rewrite the state constitutions. Unlike his plan, though, the new law permitted Black men to vote for delegates to the conventions. It also required the states to guarantee Black male suffrage in their new constitutions and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.

With the Military Reconstruction Act, Republicans asserted that all men, poor and underprivileged as well as rich and educated, should have a say in American government. Leading Republican politician James G. Blaine later reflected that the Military Reconstruction Act was of “transcendent importance and…unprecedented character. It was the most vigorous and determined action ever taken by Congress in time of peace. The effect produced by the measure was far-reaching and radical. It changed the political history of the United States. But it is well to remember that it could never have been accomplished except for the conduct of the Southern leaders.”

On July 9, 1868, the final state ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, making it part of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Thanks. Interesting read.

November 23, 2025 (Sunday)

“Do I understand correctly that there is now a dispute within the administration about whether this ‘peace plan’ was written by Russians or Americans?” foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum asked last night on social media.

Applebaum was referring to confusion over a 28-point plan for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine reported by Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios last week. After the plan was leaked, apparently to Ravid by Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions, Vice President J.D. Vance came out strongly in support of it.

But as scholar of strategic studies Phillips P. OBrien noted in Phillips’s Newsletter, once it became widely known that the plan was written by the Russians, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to back away from it, posting on social media on Wednesday that “nding a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas. And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.”

And yet, by Friday, Trump said he expected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving: next Thursday, November 27. Former senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests.”

Yesterday a group of senators, foreign affairs specialists gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the Halifax International Security Forum, told reporters they had spoken to Rubio about the plan. Senator Angus King (I-ME) said Rubio had told them that the document “was not the administration’s position” but rather “a wish list of the Russians.” Senator Mike Rounds (R-SC) said: “This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form.” He added: “I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” Rounds said. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.”

But then a spokesperson for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, called the senators’ account of the origins of the plan “blatantly false,” and Rubio abruptly switched course, posting on social media that in fact the U.S. had written the plan.

Anton La Guardia, diplomatic editor at The Economist, posted: “State Department is backpedalling on Rubio’s backpedal. If for a moment you thought the grown-ups were back in charge, think again. We’re still in the circus. ‘Unbelievable,’ mutters one disbelieving senators.”

Later that day, Erin Banco and Gram Slattery of Reuters reported that the proposal had come out of a meeting in Miami between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Dmitriev, who leads one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds. They reported that senior officials in the State Department and on the National Security Council were not briefed about the plan.

This morning, Bill Kristol of The Bulwark reported rumors that Vice President J.D. Vance was “key to US embrace of Russia plan on Ukraine, Rubio (and even Trump) out of the loop.” He posted that relations between Vance and Rubio are “awful” and that Rubio did, in fact, tell the senators what they said he did.

Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, posted: “Foreign nations now have to deal with rival factions of the U.S. government who keep major policy initiatives secret from each other and some of which work with foreign powers as the succession battle for 2028 begins, is how one diplomat put it.”

The elections of 2026 and 2028 are clearly on Republicans’ minds as polls show Trump’s policies to be increasingly unpopular.

On Friday, Trump met at the White House with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Although Trump had previously called Mamdani a “communist lunatic” and a “stupid person” and had threatened to withhold federal funding from New York City if Mamdani won, the meeting was friendly. Trump, who has seemed warm and affable since snarling “Quiet, Piggy!” to a reporter on Air Force One on November 14, praised the mayor-elect and said he’d “feel very comfortable” living in New York City after Mamdani takes the reins.

Trump’s friendly banter with Mamdani appeared a way to acknowledge voters’ frustration with the economy. During his campaign, Mamdani promised to address those economic frustrations. Trump told reporters: “We agree on a lot more than I thought. I want him to do a great job, and we’ll help him do a great job.” This embrace of a politician MAGA Republicans had attacked as a communist left Trump’s supporters unsure how to respond.

On Friday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced she is resigning from Congress. Her last day will be January 5, 2026, days after she secures her congressional pension. In her four-page announcement, she maintained she was frustrated that those like her, who she said represent “the common American people,” cannot get their measures passed because “the Political Industrial Complex of both Political Parties” ignores them in favor of “orporate and global interests.”

She blamed Trump for forcing her out of Congress, saying: “I have too much self respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms. And in turn, be expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.”

Greene appears to be shifting to fit into a post-Trump future. “When the common American people finally realize and understand that the Political Industrial Complex of both parties is ripping this country apart, that not one elected leader like me is able to stop Washington’s machine from gradually destroying our country, and instead the reality is that they, common Americans, The People, possess the real power over Washington,” she wrote, “then I’ll be here by their side to rebuild it.”

Another scandal coming from the Cabinet will not help the administration dig out from its cratering popularity.

Just after midnight Friday night, the former fiancé of the journalist who had a romantic relationship with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped another installment of his version of the saga. It included a graphic pornographic poem that would have ended a cabinet member’s career in any normal administration. The ex-fiancé said other poems he had found were even more explicit.

This revelation came the day after Kennedy acknowledged that he had personally told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change information on the CDC website to say the claim that vaccines do not cause autism is not “evidence-based.” As Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times notes, Kennedy admits that studies have shown no link between vaccines and autism, but he wanted the change because there are still other studies to be done. As Stolberg wrote, “He said he is not saying vaccines cause autism; he is simply saying there is no proof that they don’t.”

Kennedy is neither a doctor nor a scholar of public health, and Stolberg notes that “t is highly unusual for a health secretary to personally order a change to scientific guidance.”

In order to get support for his cabinet nomination, Kennedy promised Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, that he would not remove from the CDC website a statement saying that vaccines do not cause autism. That statement is still at the top of the “Autism and Vaccines” page of the CDC website, but now it has an asterisk keyed to a footnote saying it had not been removed because of Kennedy’s promise to Cassidy, and the text of the page says that “studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”

Today, CNN’s Jake Tapper said to Cassidy: “He lied to you.” Cassidy answered: “Well, first let me say, what is most important to the American people, speaking as a physician, vaccines are safe. As has been pointed out, it’s actually not disputed. It’s actually quite well proven that vaccines are not associated with autism. There’s a fringe out there that thinks so, but they’re quite a fringe. President Trump agrees that vaccines are safe.”

Cassidy tried to suggest that focusing on Kennedy’s lie was “titillating” but that Americans needed to move on. Tapper answered: “This isn’t about titillation. This is about the fact that you are the chairman of the health committee and you voted to confirm somebody that by all accounts from the medical and scientific community and his own family…is actually making America less healthy.”

Thanks for posting the HCR letter.

:)

November 24, 2025 (Monday)

U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie of South Carolina today dismissed the indictments of former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that President Donald J. Trump’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid.

Trump had demanded the indictment of the two. When he was FBI director, Comey had refused to drop an investigation into Trump’s then–national security advisor Mike Flynn, who had lied to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian operative before Trump took office. James had successfully sued Trump, several of his children, and the Trump Organization for fraud, and when the interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Seibert, said there was not enough evidence to indict them, Trump forced him out of office and replaced him with Halligan, a former insurance lawyer and Trump aide.

Within days, Halligan obtained a grand jury indictment for Comey, charging him with lying to Congress, and another for James, charging her with alleged mortgage fraud. As David Kurtz points out in Talking Points Memo, the indictments were widely understood to be targeted prosecutions of those Trump considered enemies.

By law, after a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney leaves the job, the attorney general can appoint an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days. If the position still has not been filled, the right to make another interim appointment goes to the district court, which has sole authority over the position until the Senate confirms a president’s nominee. This provision prevents a president from making an end run around the Senate’s duty to advise and consent by making consecutive 120-day appointments.

The Trump administration attempted to thwart this law. Trump appointed Seibert the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on January 21, and as the 120-day deadline approached, he nominated Seibert for the position. The district judges voted unanimously to keep Siebert on as the interim U.S. attorney as his nomination proceeded. But then Siebert declined to prosecute Comey and James, and Trump forced him out, pushing Attorney General Pam Bondi to put Halligan into his place as a new interim appointment.

Today, Currie found that Halligan’s appointment violated not only the law, but also the appointment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which requires the president to obtain the “advice and consent of the Senate” for such appointments. That unlawful appointment means that all of Halligan’s actions undertaken as a U.S. attorney are invalid. Because she was the only prosecutor to sign off on the Comey and James prosecutions, they, too, are invalid.

Currie wrote that if the indictments were to stand, “the Government could send any private citizen off the street—attorney or not—into the grand jury room to secure an indictment so long as the Attorney General gives her approval after the fact. That cannot be the law.”

After the judge’s decision, Comey posted a video saying that while the case mattered to him personally, “it matters most because a message has to be sent that the president of the United States cannot use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies. I don’t care what your politics are. You have to see that as fundamentally un-American and a threat to the rule of law that keeps all of us free.” He called for Americans to “stand up and show the fools who would frighten us, who would divide us, that we’re made of stronger stuff, that we believe in the rule of law, that we believe in the importance of doing things by the law.”

Attorney General Bondi said the government will “be taking all available legal action, including an immediate appeal.”

Shut down by the courts, Trump is turning to military justice to enforce his will.

Since six lawmakers released a video last week reminding service members that they must refuse to carry out unlawful orders, Trump and his loyalists have continued to insist that such a reminder is “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR… punishable by DEATH!”

Their argument appears to be that by reiterating the law, the lawmakers implied that Trump has issued unlawful orders and therefore that they made troops question their orders and thus directly attacked the chain of command. It’s a convoluted argument, one that administration officials are using to claim that the lawmakers’ reminder that troops must not obey an UNLAWFUL order is actually encouragement not to obey LAWFUL orders.

Administration officials insist that the lawmakers’ video is an attack on Trump because all of his orders have been lawful, although lawyers, lawmakers, and military personnel have expressed concerns about the legality of the administration’s deadly strikes on civilians in small boats near Venezuela.

This morning, the administration escalated its attacks on the lawmakers. The social media account of the “Department of War” posted that the department is investigating Captain Mark Kelly, a retired Navy officer who is now a Democratic senator from Arizona and who participated in the video, after “serious allegations of misconduct.” It suggested that Kelly, a retired Navy officer, could be recalled to active duty “for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”

Turning to military tribunals harks back to QAnon, a conspiracy theory that took off in 2017. It maintained Trump was leading a fight against an international ring of pedophiles that he would bring to justice through military tribunals. As recently as during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump called for those he perceives to be his enemies to be prosecuted in military tribunals, saying, for example, that former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) was “guilty of treason” because she participated in the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s social media page has been reposting QAnon sayings.

Attacking Kelly appeals to Trump’s base, but it was impetuous. As law professor John Pfaff noted: “There’s clearly no adult in the room to say ‘wait, maybe don’t go after the charismatic war hero turned literal astronaut who ran after his wife was a victim of political violence.’” On social media, a post circulated showing a picture of Kelly in his dress uniform juxtaposed with a photograph of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth guzzling from a bottle; the caption compared Kelly’s “shirt covered with medals” with Hegseth’s “shirt covered with booze.”

Kelly punched back. He posted on Facebook: “When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired—which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.

“In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.

“Secretary Hegseth’s tweet is the first I heard of this. I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death.

“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

In a conversation with MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow, Kelly was less formal: “I’ve had a missile blow up next to my airplane,” he told her. “I’ve been…nearly shot down multiple times. I’ve flown a rocket ship into space four times, built by the lowest bidder, and my wife Gabby Giffords, meeting with her constituents, shot in the head. Six people killed around her. A horrific thing. She spent six months in the hospital. We know what political violence is, and we know what causes it, too…. The statements that Donald Trump made… incite others…. He should be careful with his words.

“But I’m not going to be silenced here…. I’m going to show up for work every day, support the Constitution, do my job, hold this administration accountable, hold this president accountable when he is out of line. That’s the responsibility of every U.S. senator and every member of Congress. He’s not going to silence us.”

Ta.

November 25, 2025 (Tuesday)

Last week, a poll conducted for Global EV Alliance, made up of electric vehicle driver associations around the world, found that 52% of Americans would avoid buying a Tesla for political reasons.

Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk pumped more than $290 million into electing President Donald J. Trump and supporting the Republicans in 2024. After taking office, Trump named Musk to head the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a group that slashed through government programs and fired civil servants.

In response, protesters organized “Tesla Takedowns,” gathering at Tesla dealerships to urge people not to buy the vehicles. The protests spread internationally. In March, Trump advertised Teslas on the South Lawn of the White House to try to help slumping sales, to no avail.

In September, consumers flexed their muscle over parent company Disney’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show on ABC after pressure from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr over Kimmel’s comments following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. About three million subscribers canceled Disney+ in September, while Hulu, which Disney owns, lost 4.1 million. Monthly cancellations previously had averaged 1.2 million and 1.9 million, respectively. While not all of those cancellations could be chalked up to consumer anger over Kimmel’s suspension—Disney subscription prices went up at around the same time—Kimmel was back on the air in five days.

Every day, I am struck by all the ways in which we are reliving the 1890s.

In that era too, consumers organized, using their buying power to affect politics. As the first general secretary of the National Consumers League, Florence Kelley, put it: “To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have responsibility.”

After the Civil War, an economic boom in the North combined with the loss of young men in the war to make education more accessible to young white women. By 1870, girls made up the majority of high school graduates. Fewer than 2% of college-age Americans went to college; women made up 21% of that group. Away from the confines of home, these privileged young women studied social problems and the means of addressing them while they developed friendships with like-minded classmates.

In the mid-1880s, those women began to experiment with using their talents and newfound friendships to repair the nation’s social fabric that had been torn by urbanization and industrialization. To recreate a web of social responsibility in the growing industrial cities, young middle-class women moved into ethnic working-class neighborhoods to minister to the people living there. Jane Addams, who opened Chicago’s Hull-House with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, rejected the idea of a nation divided by haves and have-nots. She believed that all individuals were fundamentally interconnected. “Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal,” Addams later wrote.

The people who lived in these “settlement houses” dedicated themselves to filing down the sharp edges of industrialization, with its tenement housing, low wages, long hours, child labor, and disease, along with polluted air and water and unregulated food. They turned their education to addressing the immediate problems in front of them, collecting statistics to build a larger picture of the social costs of industrialization, and lobbying government officials and businessmen to improve the condition of workers, especially women and children.

They soon discovered a different lever for change.

In the midterm election of 1890, politicians recognized the power of women to swing the vote for or against a political party. When Republicans got shellacked, their leaders blamed women, who were increasingly the family shoppers, for urging their husbands to vote against the party that had forced through the McKinley Tariff of that year, raising tariff rates and thus raising consumer prices. Thomas Reed, the Republican speaker of the House, complained the party had been defeated by “the Shopping Woman.”

Historian Kathy Peiss notes that between 1885 and 1910, the six women’s magazines known as the “big six” were founded, including Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, and Good Housekeeping. By 1895, advertisements were strategically placed near recipes throughout the magazines, and brand names were scattered through their stories, a recognition of women’s role as shoppers.

Increasingly, reform-minded women were turning to women’s roles as consumers to reshape American industrialism. They came to believe that the “ultimate responsibility” for poor conditions “lodge in the consumer.” Leveraging the power of consumption could force employers to pay higher wages, establish better conditions, and protect workers. In 1891, Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose brother Robert Gould Shaw had commanded Black soldiers in the Massachusetts 54th in the 1863 Second Battle of Fort Wagner, helped to form the Consumer’s League of the City of New York (CLCNY), patterned after a similar English organization, to rally consumers to support better conditions for the workers who made the goods they bought.

In 1899, Lowell and Jane Addams founded the National Consumers League, with Florence Kelley at its head. The organization worked to combat child labor and poor working conditions and, in an era when milk was commonly adulterated with chalk and formaldehyde and candies were decorated with lead paint, lobbied for government regulation of food and drugs.

Today, the relationship between consumption and reform has taken on heightened meaning after the Tesla and the Disney boycotts. The day after Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday shopping season, and like their predecessors of a century ago, reformers are focusing on consumers’ power to push back on the policies of the Trump administration, launching a campaign they call “We Ain’t Buying It.” “We aren’t just consumers; we’re community builders,” their website says. “We’re driving the change we want to see, and demanding respect.”

As Joy-Ann Reid put it in an Instagram video: “Dear retailers who’ve decided you don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away: Here’s the thing. We ain’t buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain’t buyin’ it.”

She explained: “We’re gonna spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants’ rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We are going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain’t that, we ain’t buying it.”

“Let’s show them our power,” she told listeners. “Let’s show them what we can do together.”

As Joy-Ann Reid put it in an Instagram video: “Dear retailers who’ve decided you don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away: Here’s the thing. We ain’t buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain’t buyin’ it.”

She explained: “We’re gonna spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants’ rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We are going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain’t that, we ain’t buying it.”

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Good one!

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Thanks for posting.

:)

November 26, 2025 (Wednesday)

Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday…but not for the reasons we generally remember.

The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.

In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.

And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.

Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.

In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.

The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.

New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”

The next year, Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.

President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.

In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to wreck the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

In 1863, November’s last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation:

​​”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”

In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.

And in 1865, at least, they won.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Neophyte said:

November 26, 2025 (Wednesday)

————————-snip————————————

Happy Thanksgiving.

Thanks.

November 27, 2025 (Thursday)

Happy Thanksgiving.

Neophyte said:

November 27, 2025 (Thursday)

Happy Thanksgiving.

:)

November 28, 2025 (Friday)

As Trump’s popularity continues to drop, the MAGA coalition shows signs of cracking, and Trump’s mental acuity slips, there is a frantic feel to the administration, as if Trump’s people are trying to grab all they can, while they can.

A source has told The Telegraph that Trump is sending special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to Moscow to offer Russia’s president Vladimir Putin U.S. recognition of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and most of the other four eastern oblasts of Ukraine: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. This is the territory covered in the “Mariupol Plan” in which Russian operatives told Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, they would help Trump win the election in exchange for his looking the other way as Russia took control of the region.

Ten days ago, Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios reported on a 28-point plan that the U.S. was allegedly working on to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. Quickly, though, it became clear that the plan was actually a Russian plan that offered Russia everything it wanted—including giving Crimea and most of the four oblasts to Russia while forbidding Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and limiting the size of its military—and offered Ukraine virtually nothing. Trump was demanding that Ukraine sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving.

Then it turned out that the U.S. State Department had had nothing to do with the plan; it appeared to be the work of Witkoff, Kushner, and Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions.

Meanwhile, according to Dan De Luce, Courtney Kube, and Abigail Williams of NBC News, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll delivered the plan to Ukraine and warned Ukrainian leaders they were losing the war and must settle. Diplomatic negotiations are not a normal role for a U.S. Army secretary, who is the top civilian official within the U.S. Department of Defense, responsible for manpower, personnel, equipment, finances, and so on in the U.S. Army. Driscoll is a close ally of Vice President J.D. Vance and seems to be gaining power as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth loses it.

Neither Ukrainians nor Europeans had been consulted on the plan, and their leaders worked frantically to shift U.S. support back toward Ukraine, consistent with Washington’s formal position. Over the course of last week, Jeanna Smialek, Christopher F. Schuetze, and Lara Jakes of the New York Times reported, European and Ukrainian leaders persuaded Secretary of State Marco Rubio to include European nations and Ukraine in negotiations.

Then, on Tuesday, November 25, 2025, Bloomberg published the transcript of an October 14 phone call between Witkoff and Russian foreign-policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, in which Witkoff acknowledged that a peace deal would involve Ukrainian land concessions and coached Ushakov on how to flatter Trump to get the peace deal the men wanted. It also published a transcript of an October 29 call between Ushakov and Dmitriev in which Dmitriev told Ushakov that a U.S. “peace” plan would be as close “as possible” to Russia’s demands. It is unclear who leaked the recordings to Bloomberg, but Shaun Walker of The Guardian reported speculation that the leak came from a source in U.S. intelligence who opposed the U.S. push to reward Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

The Independent reports that Putin is refusing to give up any of his demands for an end to the war, although Russia’s central bank has begun to sell gold reserves to shore up its faltering economy. Putin told reporters in Kyrgyzstan that Russia will continue to attack Ukraine “until the last Ukrainian dies” in order to gain control of Ukraine’s industrial east.

A source told The Telegraph that the Trump administration is ready to make its own deal to recognize Russia’s control of that region. “It’s increasingly clear the Americans don’t care about the European position,” a source told The Telegraph. “They say the Europeans can do whatever they want.” Russia said it assumes it is negotiating with the U.S. alone.

Tonight, Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report that Witkoff, Kushner, and Dmitriev designed their plan to bypass U.S. national security officials and create opportunities for U.S. businessmen to win multibillion-dollar deals to develop energy and rare-earth minerals in Russia, Ukraine, and the Arctic. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals,” the journalists report, “Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”

Meanwhile, for the past day, Trump’s social media account has been posting screeds against immigrants, using the Wednesday shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard stationed in Washington, D.C., as justification. As Joyce White Vance noted, a court ruled on November 20 that the deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia was illegal but stayed the order ending it until December 11 to permit the government to appeal.

On Wednesday a suspect identified as Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal shot Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, who died from her injuries, and Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, who is critically injured. Lakanwal was also shot, but his injuries are reportedly not life threatening. Lakanwal worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan, then came to the U.S. in 2021 as part of the evacuation and resettlement of Afghans after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan. Lakanwal was granted asylum in the U.S. earlier this year.

Last night—Thanksgiving—at 11:25 p.m., Trump’s social media account posted an image of an airplane packed with refugees from Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrew and the Afghan military collapsed in August 2021. The U.S. exit came from a February 29, 2020, agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, but not the Afghan government, during the first Trump administration known as the Doha Agreement, or the “Agreement for bringing Peace to Afghanistan.” The U.S. promised to secure the release of 5,000 of the Taliban’s fighters imprisoned by the Afghan government and to withdraw U.S. troops by May 2021 in exchange for the Taliban promising to stop killing U.S. soldiers.

When he took office, President Joe Biden extended the deadline until August 31 but did not reverse Trump’s commitment. As the U.S. pulled out the final 2,500 troops Trump had left in the country, the Afghan army collapsed.

Disregarding both Trump’s own part in the exit from Afghanistan and Trump’s own administration’s vetting of Lakanwal for asylum, Trump’s social media post blamed “Joe Biden and his Thugs” for “the horrendous airlift from Afghanistan.” It claimed that “undreds of thousands of people poured into our Country totally unvetted and unchecked,” and said:

“We will fix it.”

Just one minute after linking the shooting to Biden’s policies, Trump’s social media account continued: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being ‘Politically Correct,’ and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration.”

What followed was a screed that sounded like it was written by white nationalist Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who is on a crusade to expel immigrants from the U.S. It was divided into two posts, with what seemed designed to be the second post published a minute before what looked like it was supposed to be the first.
In reverse order, then, the account claimed, falsely, that most immigrants are “from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels,” and that they are supported extravagantly by taxes paid by U.S. citizens. It blamed refugees for the nation’s “ailed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits,” and used a slur to describe Minnesota governor Tim Walz, claiming he has done nothing to get rid of his state’s Somalian refugees.

The next post blamed immigration policy for eroding the U.S. standard of living, and announced a dramatic purge of immigrants from the country: “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

The idea of stripping some of the country’s 24.5 million naturalized citizens of their citizenship changes the nature of what it means to be an American. As Faiza Patel and Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center noted last month, from 1990 to 2017 only about 11 people a year lost their citizenship, usually for having hidden serious criminal activity or human rights violations in applying for citizenship. In contrast, observers today note that when Hitler came to power in 1933, the German government began to strip Jews, as well as Roma and political opponents, of their German citizenship, paving the way for the confiscation of their property, their rights, and eventually their lives.

Trump’s social media post went on: “These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, 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 Tuesday, lawmakers said the counterterrorism division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has opened an investigation into the six lawmakers who made a video reminding service members that they must refuse unlawful orders and that the lawmakers would stand behind them as they did so. Trump loyalists have turned their statement on its head, insisting that since Trump has never given an unlawful order, their video encouraged service members to disregard lawful orders and thus was “sedition” punishable by death.

Today, Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Hegseth told a Joint Special Operations commander overseeing an attack on a small vessel carrying 11 people on September 2 to “kill everybody.” A missile strike shattered the boat and set it afire, but two men survived. A second strike fulfilled Hegseth’s order. According to Horton and Nakashima, 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.

Former military lawyer Todd Huntley, who advised special operations forces for seven years, told the Washington Post journalists that the strikes against civilians amount to murder because the U.S. is not at war, while even during wartime, killing those who cannot fight back is a war crime.

Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA), a Marine Corps veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said: “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.” Hegseth dismissed the story as “fake news.”

The administration justifies its strikes on the Venezuelan boats by claiming to fight “narcoterrorism,” but today Trump announced a full pardon for former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty last year by an American jury of conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. He was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. Trump announced the pardon on social media, writing “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”

Tonight, Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and the committee’s top Democrat, Jack Reed (D-RI), issued a statement saying: “The Committee is aware of recent news reports—and the Department of Defense’s initial response—regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

The administration justifies its strikes on the Venezuelan boats by claiming to fight “narcoterrorism,” but today Trump announced a full pardon for former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty last year by an American jury of conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. He was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. Trump announced the pardon on social media, writing “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”

——————————————————————————————

I wonder how much that pardon cost.

…………………………………………………………………….

Thanks for posting the letter from HCR.

November 29, 2025 (Saturday)

In the wake of yesterday’s report from Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Special Operations to kill the survivors of a September 2 strike on a small boat off Venezuela, the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees have announced they intend to conduct “vigorous oversight” and “gather a full accounting” of the operation. The two committees referred to the Department of Defense by that name, rather than by the “Department of War” rebrand Hegseth and Trump have pushed.

Today former judge advocate generals (JAGs), military lawyers, in the Former JAGs Working Group issued a statement declaring that it unanimously “considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” and called for “anyone who issues or follows such orders be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.”

The Former JAGs Working Group organized in February 2025 after Hegseth purged JAGs from the Army and Air Force and systematically dismantled the military’s legal guardrails. “Had those guardrails been in place,” they wrote, “we are confident they would have prevented these crimes.”
Congress appears to be stepping up on this issue, and that willingness to cross Trump suggests members are recalculating Trump’s power relative to their own. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted: “This is genuinely big news…. Republicans are challenging Trump now because he seems weak. No one wants to back a weak horse.”

A Gallup poll released yesterday shows President Donald J. Trump’s job approval rating at 36% with disapproval at 60%. Since last month, Trump’s approval has plummeted 11 points. Republicans’ approval of Trump has fallen seven points to a second-term low, while approval among Independents has fallen eight points to its lowest point in either term. Only 3% of Democrats approve of his job performance. Although war conditions usually help a president’s popularity, Trump’s threat to attack Venezuela attracts the support of only 30% of Americans. Seventy percent oppose such military action.

There are signs that the MAGA coalition is fracturing. A Politico poll released yesterday shows that just 55% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 see themselves as MAGA. While the MAGA 55% remain largely loyal to Trump, 38% do not consider themselves as MAGA and are less enamored of him than are his MAGA loyalists.

Last week a new feature on X that permitted users to see where accounts originate revealed that a number of high-engagement MAGA accounts that claim to be those of patriotic Americans are in fact from Russia, Eastern Europe, India, Nigeria, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Since X pays certain content creators for tweets that drive engagement, posters from other countries have a financial incentive to post material that feeds the anger of American users and thus will get reposted.

The splintering of the MAGA coalition showed when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced on November 21 she would not run for reelection in a public letter that attacked Trump and “Establishment Republicans.” She called out Trump’s threats to primary her, and said, “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

Three days later, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News said her letter “rang true to” many House Republicans. One senior House Republican wrote to Sherman: “This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL. And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all—appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened. They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies. Not even the high profile, the regular rank and file random members are more upset than ever. Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms.

“More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”

Today, Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), a staunch Trump ally, announced he would not seek reelection in 2026, saying he intends to “focus on my family.” Nehls co-sponsored legislation to put Trump on the $100 bill—although federal law prohibits using a living person’s likeness on U.S. currency—and to rename Washington Dulles International Airport, which serves the nation’s capital, after Trump.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, recently joined California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in speaking out against the Trump administration’s plan to offer up to 34 offshore drilling leases off the coasts of Alaska, California, and Florida.

CNN’s Erin Burnett recently interviewed chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase Jamie Dimon. His answer to her questions as to why his company has not contributed to Trump’s proposed ballroom suggested he is anticipating a change in administration. “We have an issue,” he answered, “which is anything we do, since we do a lot of contracts with governments here and around the world, we have to be very careful how anything is perceived, and also how the next D O J is going to deal with it. So we’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like…buying favors….”

Dissatisfaction with Trump and his MAGA party is showing in Indiana, too, where administration officials have put extraordinary pressure on state legislators to redistrict the state to try to net the Republicans more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. On Wednesday, November 26, Andy East of the Indianapolis Daily Journal reported on Indiana state senator Greg Walker, a Republican who is standing firm on his refusal to vote in favor of redistricting. “I was taught as a child the difference between right and wrong,” Walker told The (Columbus) Republic, “and this is just wrong on so many levels.”

Walker said Trump invited him for an Oval Office visit on November 19. Walker declined, suggesting the invitation violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using public resources for partisan purposes. He said he would have reported the violation to federal authorities “if I thought that there was anyone of integrity in Washington that would follow through on my accusation and actually cause someone to lose their job over it.”

He continued: “How does have the time to mess with a nobody like me with all of the important matters that are to take his attention as the leader of the executive branch in this nation? There is no way that he should have time to have a conversation with me about Indiana mapmaking when that’s not his business, for starters. But secondly, doesn’t he have anything better to do? I can make a big list of things that are more important for him to focus on.”

Mid-decade redistricting was “the president trying to save his own skin by holding a majority in Congress,” Walker said. “It’s so that he’s not impeached again. That’s all this is about.”

Ta.

What’s he got against Venezuela?

Divine Angel said:

What’s he got against Venezuela?

They don’t pay him and his cronies enough money, nor give them their fair share of business “opportunities”.

Michael V said:

Divine Angel said:

What’s he got against Venezuela?

They don’t pay him and his cronies enough money, nor give them their fair share of business “opportunities”.

And, it’s a distraction.

Wars, or the threat of wars, will always push other things off the front page. Things like embarrassing files.

Venezuela is a really handy distraction. It’s a country with a regime that’s really pretty nasty, it’s close (sort of) to the USA, its got ties to drug trafficking, it’s got ties to illegal oil supplies to North Korea and Russia and to helping sanctioned countries outflank those sanctions.

So, Trump can pick a fight with Venezuela, and fairly safely ‘justify’ it.

Won’t do much for his Nobel Peace Prize dreams, though.

While a ‘peace settlement’ in Ukraine might have put points on the board for him, starting a war with Venezuela is only going to take him back to zero.

captain_spalding said:

Michael V said:

Divine Angel said:

What’s he got against Venezuela?

They don’t pay him and his cronies enough money, nor give them their fair share of business “opportunities”.

And, it’s a distraction.

Wars, or the threat of wars, will always push other things off the front page. Things like embarrassing files.

Venezuela is a really handy distraction. It’s a country with a regime that’s really pretty nasty, it’s close (sort of) to the USA, its got ties to drug trafficking, it’s got ties to illegal oil supplies to North Korea and Russia and to helping sanctioned countries outflank those sanctions.

So, Trump can pick a fight with Venezuela, and fairly safely ‘justify’ it.

Won’t do much for his Nobel Peace Prize dreams, though.

While a ‘peace settlement’ in Ukraine might have put points on the board for him, starting a war with Venezuela is only going to take him back to zero.

Right right right, ok

captain_spalding said:

Michael V said:

Divine Angel said:

What’s he got against Venezuela?

They don’t pay him and his cronies enough money, nor give them their fair share of business “opportunities”.

And, it’s a distraction.

Wars, or the threat of wars, will always push other things off the front page. Things like embarrassing files.

Venezuela is a really handy distraction. It’s a country with a regime that’s really pretty nasty, it’s close (sort of) to the USA, its got ties to drug trafficking, it’s got ties to illegal oil supplies to North Korea and Russia and to helping sanctioned countries outflank those sanctions.

So, Trump can pick a fight with Venezuela, and fairly safely ‘justify’ it.

Won’t do much for his Nobel Peace Prize dreams, though.

While a ‘peace settlement’ in Ukraine might have put points on the board for him, starting a war with Venezuela is only going to take him back to zero.

what about a peacekeeping special military operation that isn’t a war