November 30, 2025 (Sunday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 1, 2025 (Monday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the post, Neophyte.

Divine Angel said:

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

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

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

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

wait

Neophyte said:

December 1, 2025 (Monday)

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

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

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

AussieDJ said:

Neophyte said:

December 1, 2025 (Monday)

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

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

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

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

December 2, 2025 (Tuesday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ta.

Hold up, is that the Australian Miranda Devine?

Divine Angel said:

Hold up, is that the Australian Miranda Devine?

Yes.

December 3, 2025 (Wednesday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ta.

Divine Angel said:

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

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

He might not die in office, I suppose.

December 4, 2025 (Thursday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 5, 2025 (Friday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

buffy said:

December 5, 2025 (Friday)

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

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

December 6, 2025 (Saturday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

Thanks.

December 7, 2025 (Sunday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ta.

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

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

buffy said:

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

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

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

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

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

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

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

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

furious said:

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

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

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

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

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

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

captain_spalding said:

furious said:

captain_spalding said:

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

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

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

It’s been outsourced to Trump World Communications Group.

December 8, 2025 (Monday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neophyte said:

December 8, 2025 (Monday)

……

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

Thanks.

Thanks.

December 9, 2025 (Tuesday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 10, 2025 (Wednesday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They included the right to participate in art and science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divine Angel said:

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

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

FMD

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

Sanctions? How?

buffy said:

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

Sanctions? How?

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

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

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

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

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

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

Sanctions? How?

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

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

Michael V said:

captain_spalding said:

captain_spalding said:

buffy said:

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

Sanctions? How?

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

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

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

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

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

buffy said:

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

Sanctions? How?

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

btm said:

buffy said:

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

Sanctions? How?

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

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

buffy said:

btm said:

buffy said:

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

Sanctions? How?

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

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

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

Michael V said:

buffy said:

btm said:

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

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

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

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

Neophyte said:

December 10, 2025 (Wednesday)

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

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

:)

buffy said:

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

Sanctions? How?

They already have sanctions on various UN figures, such as

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

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

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

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

—-

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

dv said:

buffy said:

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

Sanctions? How?

They already have sanctions on various UN figures, such as

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

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

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

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

—-

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

Bloody ‘eck!

December 11, 2025 (Thursday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 12, 2025 (Friday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progressivism is as deeply rooted in American history as reaction.

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

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

December 13, 2025 (Saturday)

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

Let’s do it, and regroup tomorrow.

Neophyte said:

December 13, 2025 (Saturday)

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

Let’s do it, and regroup tomorrow.

:)

December 14, 2025 (Sunday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we’re supposed to believe that? 🙄

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

And Trump condoms, “I’m HUUUUUGE!”

Gross. 🤮

Divine Angel said:

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

And we’re supposed to believe that? 🙄

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

And Trump condoms, “I’m HUUUUUGE!”

Gross. 🤮

and in breach of the trade practices act false advertising

December 15, 2025 (Monday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neophyte said:

December 15, 2025 (Monday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

December 15, 2025 (Monday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divine Angel said:

Michael V said:

Neophyte said:

December 15, 2025 (Monday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah.

Thanks for explaining.

:)

December 16, 2025 (Tuesday)

While President Donald J. Trump was gloating over the horrific murders of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, the U.S. military yesterday struck three small boats in the eastern Pacific, killing eight people. U.S. Southern Command announced the strikes on social media, saying they were conducted “at the direction of War Pete Hegseth.” It claimed that intelligence had confirmed that the vessels were “engaged in narco-trafficking.”

This brings the number of people killed in the U.S. strikes to at least 95.

As Piper Hudspeth Blackburn of CNN reports, the administration maintains the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” against drug cartels. But legal experts dismiss this claim and say the U.S. has no legal basis for the deadly attacks on the small boats. Notably, as Bill Kristol of The Bulwark pointed out on December 11, the government has gotten legal justification for its actions when it can: before the U.S. seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela last week, the government apparently secured a warrant for the seizure from a federal judge because the Treasury Department had sanctioned the ship in 2022 for illegal activities related to smuggling Iranian oil.

In the case of the strikes on the small boats, though, the administration has not provided evidence of its claims either to the public or to Congress, whose permission to continue the strikes is required by the 1973 War Powers Act if indeed the country is engaged in an armed conflict.

Today, Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed the House and the Senate on the strikes but continued to refuse to show the lawmakers an unedited version of the video of a strike of September 2 that killed two survivors of a previous strike, an event that legal analysts suggest is a war crime or murder. After he left the briefing, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said “that the administration had no legal justification for these strikes and had no national security justification for these strikes.” He noted that the officers admitted that the drugs going through Venezuela were not fentanyl, as the administration has suggested, but rather primarily cocaine headed for Europe.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) called the briefing “a joke.… There was not a single piece of intelligence that was shared that even rises to the level of any other briefing that we’ve seen on Ukraine, China, anything…. This was not a serious intelligence briefing; this was a communication of an opinion.”

Hegseth later told reporters that members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees will be able to see the unedited video tomorrow, adding: “Of course, we’re not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public.”

Ashley Murray of News from the States quoted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who said after the meeting: “The administration came to this briefing empty handed. If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean? Every senator is entitled to see it.” Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said: “It is hard to square the widespread, routine, prompt posting of detailed videos of every strike, with a concern that posting a portion of the video of the first strike would violate a variety of classification concerns.”

The Department of Justice today argued in court that Trump’s ballroom project must go forward for reasons of national security despite the lawsuit filed on Friday. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop the project from going forward without legally required reviews and public input. Secret Service deputy director Matthew Quinn told the court that when Trump tore down the East Wing in October, he destroyed the security infrastructure under the building. Now, he said, “any pause in construction, even temporarily, would…hamper the Secret Service’s ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission.”

But while Trump focuses on his architectural projects, the administration seems unable to meet other obligations.

Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel is facing criticism for announcing on social media that the FBI had detained a person of interest in Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, that killed two and injured nine others. That individual was released hours later. This is not the first time Patel has rushed to make an announcement that later turned out to be incorrect.

When asked why the FBI is having trouble locating the suspect, Trump tried to blame the university. “You’d really have to ask the school a little bit more about that because this was a school problem,” he said. “They had their own guards. They had their own police. They had their own everything, but you’d have to ask that question really to the school, not to the FBI. We came in after the fact, and the FBI will do a good job, but they came in after the fact.”

An interview with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles published in Vanity Fair today reinforces the impression that the administration is chaotic. In eleven interviews with Wiles over the course of Trump’s second term so far, journalist Chris Whipple examined the administration’s handling of major issues: the destruction of USAID, deportations of immigrants, Trump’s tariff war, the deployment of National Guard troops in Democratic-dominated cities, Trump’s “revenge” against those he perceives as enemies, the destruction of Gaza, and the administration’s attack on small boats from Venezuela.

Wiles told Whipple that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” suggesting he cannot imagine limits on his behavior, and quoted him as judging people “by their genes”; that Vice President J.D. Vance converted from being a Never Trumper to a major MAGA booster for political reasons; that director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, is “a right-wing absolute zealot”; that Musk’s reposting of a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao was a reflection of his drug use; and that Trump is, indeed, embarked on a project to use the power of the government to hurt people he hates.

After the article appeared, Wiles issued a statement that did not say Whipple had misquoted her, but called the article “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.” She continued: “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”

Apparently to demonstrate unanimity, the White House got senior officials to put out on social media statements supporting Wiles.

One of the things Wiles discussed with Whipple was the administration’s strikes against the small boats from Venezuela. Wiles suggested that, for all his talk about drug dealers, Trump is primarily interested in regime change. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles told Whipple. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

This afternoon, Trump announced he would address the nation tomorrow night.

Then, at 6:46 this evening, he posted on social media: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) noted that the “threatened military action directly contradicts what Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth told my Senate colleagues and I today about the mission and goals of their operations in the Caribbean. This is a dangerous escalation, and this administration must come before Congress for public hearings and explain to the American people why they are risking pulling us into another forever war.”

Neophyte said:

December 16, 2025 (Tuesday)

While President Donald J. Trump was gloating over the horrific murders of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, the U.S. military yesterday struck three small boats in the eastern Pacific, killing eight people. U.S. Southern Command announced the strikes on social media, saying they were conducted “at the direction of War Pete Hegseth.” It claimed that intelligence had confirmed that the vessels were “engaged in narco-trafficking.”

This brings the number of people killed in the U.S. strikes to at least 95.

As Piper Hudspeth Blackburn of CNN reports, the administration maintains the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” against drug cartels. But legal experts dismiss this claim and say the U.S. has no legal basis for the deadly attacks on the small boats. Notably, as Bill Kristol of The Bulwark pointed out on December 11, the government has gotten legal justification for its actions when it can: before the U.S. seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela last week, the government apparently secured a warrant for the seizure from a federal judge because the Treasury Department had sanctioned the ship in 2022 for illegal activities related to smuggling Iranian oil.

In the case of the strikes on the small boats, though, the administration has not provided evidence of its claims either to the public or to Congress, whose permission to continue the strikes is required by the 1973 War Powers Act if indeed the country is engaged in an armed conflict.

Today, Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed the House and the Senate on the strikes but continued to refuse to show the lawmakers an unedited version of the video of a strike of September 2 that killed two survivors of a previous strike, an event that legal analysts suggest is a war crime or murder. After he left the briefing, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said “that the administration had no legal justification for these strikes and had no national security justification for these strikes.” He noted that the officers admitted that the drugs going through Venezuela were not fentanyl, as the administration has suggested, but rather primarily cocaine headed for Europe.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) called the briefing “a joke.… There was not a single piece of intelligence that was shared that even rises to the level of any other briefing that we’ve seen on Ukraine, China, anything…. This was not a serious intelligence briefing; this was a communication of an opinion.”

Hegseth later told reporters that members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees will be able to see the unedited video tomorrow, adding: “Of course, we’re not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public.”

Ashley Murray of News from the States quoted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who said after the meeting: “The administration came to this briefing empty handed. If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean? Every senator is entitled to see it.” Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said: “It is hard to square the widespread, routine, prompt posting of detailed videos of every strike, with a concern that posting a portion of the video of the first strike would violate a variety of classification concerns.”

The Department of Justice today argued in court that Trump’s ballroom project must go forward for reasons of national security despite the lawsuit filed on Friday. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop the project from going forward without legally required reviews and public input. Secret Service deputy director Matthew Quinn told the court that when Trump tore down the East Wing in October, he destroyed the security infrastructure under the building. Now, he said, “any pause in construction, even temporarily, would…hamper the Secret Service’s ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission.”

But while Trump focuses on his architectural projects, the administration seems unable to meet other obligations.

Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel is facing criticism for announcing on social media that the FBI had detained a person of interest in Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, that killed two and injured nine others. That individual was released hours later. This is not the first time Patel has rushed to make an announcement that later turned out to be incorrect.

When asked why the FBI is having trouble locating the suspect, Trump tried to blame the university. “You’d really have to ask the school a little bit more about that because this was a school problem,” he said. “They had their own guards. They had their own police. They had their own everything, but you’d have to ask that question really to the school, not to the FBI. We came in after the fact, and the FBI will do a good job, but they came in after the fact.”

An interview with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles published in Vanity Fair today reinforces the impression that the administration is chaotic. In eleven interviews with Wiles over the course of Trump’s second term so far, journalist Chris Whipple examined the administration’s handling of major issues: the destruction of USAID, deportations of immigrants, Trump’s tariff war, the deployment of National Guard troops in Democratic-dominated cities, Trump’s “revenge” against those he perceives as enemies, the destruction of Gaza, and the administration’s attack on small boats from Venezuela.

Wiles told Whipple that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” suggesting he cannot imagine limits on his behavior, and quoted him as judging people “by their genes”; that Vice President J.D. Vance converted from being a Never Trumper to a major MAGA booster for political reasons; that director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, is “a right-wing absolute zealot”; that Musk’s reposting of a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao was a reflection of his drug use; and that Trump is, indeed, embarked on a project to use the power of the government to hurt people he hates.

After the article appeared, Wiles issued a statement that did not say Whipple had misquoted her, but called the article “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.” She continued: “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”

Apparently to demonstrate unanimity, the White House got senior officials to put out on social media statements supporting Wiles.

One of the things Wiles discussed with Whipple was the administration’s strikes against the small boats from Venezuela. Wiles suggested that, for all his talk about drug dealers, Trump is primarily interested in regime change. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles told Whipple. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

This afternoon, Trump announced he would address the nation tomorrow night.

Then, at 6:46 this evening, he posted on social media: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) noted that the “threatened military action directly contradicts what Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth told my Senate colleagues and I today about the mission and goals of their operations in the Caribbean. This is a dangerous escalation, and this administration must come before Congress for public hearings and explain to the American people why they are risking pulling us into another forever war.”

Just watching a video with Reiner in it right now. And it’s about Trump.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6yAgXBIuAyM

“ Then, at 6:46 this evening, he posted on social media: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!””

They’ll invade the day the Epstein files are due to be released, which, from memory, is sometime in the next few days.

Divine Angel said:

“ Then, at 6:46 this evening, he posted on social media: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!””

They’ll invade the day the Epstein files are due to be released, which, from memory, is sometime in the next few days.

The 19th IIRC – they won’t do it, of course.

December 17, 2025 (Wednesday)

This morning, four vulnerable Republicans signed onto the discharge petition all House Democrats have signed to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring a bill to extend the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) markets to the floor for a vote. The proposal extends the credits for three years.

Republicans who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want the extensions have been fighting their colleagues who want to get rid of the ACA and slash government spending in general. Instead of extending the credits, House leadership is proposing a package of policies popular among their conference; the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that it will drop about 100,000 people a year off health insurance through 2035 but will save the government $35.6 billion.

Without the extension of the premium tax credits, which Republicans permitted to lapse at the end of the year when they passed their July budget reconciliation bill that they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the 24 million Americans who buy insurance on the ACA marketplace will see their insurance premiums skyrocket, and millions will lose their health insurance altogether. And yet, Republicans oppose the extensions, which will cost the government about $350 billion over the next ten years. The Republicans’ extension of the 2017 tax cuts in that same bill will cost about $4 trillion over the same period.

Yesterday, Johnson dismissed the members of his conference who wanted to vote on the extension, saying that “many of them did want a vote on this Obamacare covid-era subsidy the Democrats created. We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve, and it just was not to be.” Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY) told reporters: “This is absolute bullsh*t.”

When the Republican-controlled House Rules Committee struck down all the Republican attempts to amend the Republican bill by extending the tax credits, four Republicans signed the Democrats’ discharge petition. The four Republicans who signed are Lawler and Brian Fitzpatrick, Rob Bresnahan, and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania. David G. Valadao of California told Marianna Sotomayor, Kadia Goba, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post that he would have signed, too.

This evening, the House passed the Republican healthcare measure, which is expected to die in the Senate. The House will vote on extending the premium tax credits in January.

Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported today on a court filing by lawyers for the government that claims it is legal for the administration to distribute federal money only to Republican-dominated states, withholding it from Democratic-dominated states. The government admitted that it withheld grants from the Department of Energy according to “whether a grantee’s address was located in a State that tends to elect and/or has recently elected Democratic candidates in state and national elections (so-called ‘Blue States’).” Without evidence, the government claimed that such discrimination “is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”

Kornfield and Natanson note that this is a “remarkably candid admission” that “echoes…Trump’s frequent vows to punish cities and states that he sees as his enemies, from withholding disaster relief for Southern California to targeting blue cities with National Guard troops.”

Joey Garrison of USA Today reported yesterday that a senior White House official told him the Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Since 1960, NCAR scientists have studied Earth’s atmosphere, meteorology, climate science, the Sun, and the impacts of weather and climate on the environment and society. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote that “ismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.”

Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought told Garrison that the center is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and that the government will break it up, moving what he called “any vital activities such as weather research” to “another entity or location.” Earlier that day, Garrison notes, the administration cancelled $109 million in grants to Colorado.

Colorado governor Jared Polis said he had not heard the news about NCAR but that “f true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked. Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families. If these cuts move forward, we will lose our competitive advantage against foreign powers and adversaries in the pursuit of scientific discovery.”

Trump has repeatedly attacked Polis, a Democrat, since his refusal to pardon former Colorado election official Tina Peters, convicted by a jury for state crimes in facilitating a data breach in her quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Peters is serving a nine-year prison sentence. On December 11, Trump granted Peters a “full pardon,” but since presidents cannot issue pardons for state crimes, that means little unless Polis also pardons her.

Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket reported yesterday on escalating calls for violence to free Peters coming from prominent right-wing figures. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted after the threat to close NCAR that he was “earing this is payback for Colorado not honoring Trump/Peters ‘pardon.’”

Former special counsel Jack Smith testified today behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. According to Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News, who obtained portions of Smith’s opening statement, Smith told the committee that he and his team found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Smith earlier this month, rejecting Smith’s offer to testify in public. Jordan was among those claiming to be outraged at the news that Smith had obtained the call records of nine congressional Republicans related to the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election. Those records listed who was called and the time, date, and length of the call, without information about the content of it.

In 2022 the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed that Trump and Jordan had a ten-minute phone call on the morning of January 6. That afternoon, Jordan objected to the counting of the votes that would certify Democrat Joe Biden as president. Jordan refused to cooperate with the committee when it asked for more information.

Smith told the committee that the phone records “were lawfully subpoenaed and were relevant to complete a comprehensive” investigation. He continued: “January 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 100 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police officers that day. Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election.”

“I didn’t choose those Members,” Smith said, “President Trump did.”

Republicans were hoping to undermine Smith and to portray him as part of a Department of Justice weaponized under the Biden administration. “Jack Smith should be in jail—if not prison,” Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney of Politico. “He’s a crook. Jack Smith is a crook, and he needs to be held accountable for all his games that he played.”

After Smith testified, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Jordan “made an excellent decision in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly, because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities of January 6.”

Today, news broke that Trump has added plaques to the hall of portraits of former presidents hanging in the White House. A plaque under the photo of President Barack Obama says he “was one of the most divisive political figures in American History,” who “passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act.”

Under a photograph of an autopen, with which Trump replaced the portrait of Biden, the plaque begins: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction….”

Thanks Neo. I just remembered to check for that but you have beaten me to it.

Neophyte said:

December 17, 2025 (Wednesday)

This morning, four vulnerable Republicans signed onto the discharge petition all House Democrats have signed to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring a bill to extend the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) markets to the floor for a vote. The proposal extends the credits for three years.

Republicans who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want the extensions have been fighting their colleagues who want to get rid of the ACA and slash government spending in general. Instead of extending the credits, House leadership is proposing a package of policies popular among their conference; the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that it will drop about 100,000 people a year off health insurance through 2035 but will save the government $35.6 billion.

Without the extension of the premium tax credits, which Republicans permitted to lapse at the end of the year when they passed their July budget reconciliation bill that they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the 24 million Americans who buy insurance on the ACA marketplace will see their insurance premiums skyrocket, and millions will lose their health insurance altogether. And yet, Republicans oppose the extensions, which will cost the government about $350 billion over the next ten years. The Republicans’ extension of the 2017 tax cuts in that same bill will cost about $4 trillion over the same period.

Yesterday, Johnson dismissed the members of his conference who wanted to vote on the extension, saying that “many of them did want a vote on this Obamacare covid-era subsidy the Democrats created. We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve, and it just was not to be.” Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY) told reporters: “This is absolute bullsh*t.”

When the Republican-controlled House Rules Committee struck down all the Republican attempts to amend the Republican bill by extending the tax credits, four Republicans signed the Democrats’ discharge petition. The four Republicans who signed are Lawler and Brian Fitzpatrick, Rob Bresnahan, and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania. David G. Valadao of California told Marianna Sotomayor, Kadia Goba, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post that he would have signed, too.

This evening, the House passed the Republican healthcare measure, which is expected to die in the Senate. The House will vote on extending the premium tax credits in January.

Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported today on a court filing by lawyers for the government that claims it is legal for the administration to distribute federal money only to Republican-dominated states, withholding it from Democratic-dominated states. The government admitted that it withheld grants from the Department of Energy according to “whether a grantee’s address was located in a State that tends to elect and/or has recently elected Democratic candidates in state and national elections (so-called ‘Blue States’).” Without evidence, the government claimed that such discrimination “is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”

Kornfield and Natanson note that this is a “remarkably candid admission” that “echoes…Trump’s frequent vows to punish cities and states that he sees as his enemies, from withholding disaster relief for Southern California to targeting blue cities with National Guard troops.”

Joey Garrison of USA Today reported yesterday that a senior White House official told him the Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Since 1960, NCAR scientists have studied Earth’s atmosphere, meteorology, climate science, the Sun, and the impacts of weather and climate on the environment and society. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote that “ismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.”

Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought told Garrison that the center is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and that the government will break it up, moving what he called “any vital activities such as weather research” to “another entity or location.” Earlier that day, Garrison notes, the administration cancelled $109 million in grants to Colorado.

Colorado governor Jared Polis said he had not heard the news about NCAR but that “f true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked. Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families. If these cuts move forward, we will lose our competitive advantage against foreign powers and adversaries in the pursuit of scientific discovery.”

Trump has repeatedly attacked Polis, a Democrat, since his refusal to pardon former Colorado election official Tina Peters, convicted by a jury for state crimes in facilitating a data breach in her quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Peters is serving a nine-year prison sentence. On December 11, Trump granted Peters a “full pardon,” but since presidents cannot issue pardons for state crimes, that means little unless Polis also pardons her.

Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket reported yesterday on escalating calls for violence to free Peters coming from prominent right-wing figures. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted after the threat to close NCAR that he was “earing this is payback for Colorado not honoring Trump/Peters ‘pardon.’”

Former special counsel Jack Smith testified today behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. According to Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News, who obtained portions of Smith’s opening statement, Smith told the committee that he and his team found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Smith earlier this month, rejecting Smith’s offer to testify in public. Jordan was among those claiming to be outraged at the news that Smith had obtained the call records of nine congressional Republicans related to the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election. Those records listed who was called and the time, date, and length of the call, without information about the content of it.

In 2022 the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed that Trump and Jordan had a ten-minute phone call on the morning of January 6. That afternoon, Jordan objected to the counting of the votes that would certify Democrat Joe Biden as president. Jordan refused to cooperate with the committee when it asked for more information.

Smith told the committee that the phone records “were lawfully subpoenaed and were relevant to complete a comprehensive” investigation. He continued: “January 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 100 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police officers that day. Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election.”

“I didn’t choose those Members,” Smith said, “President Trump did.”

Republicans were hoping to undermine Smith and to portray him as part of a Department of Justice weaponized under the Biden administration. “Jack Smith should be in jail—if not prison,” Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney of Politico. “He’s a crook. Jack Smith is a crook, and he needs to be held accountable for all his games that he played.”

After Smith testified, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Jordan “made an excellent decision in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly, because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities of January 6.”

Today, news broke that Trump has added plaques to the hall of portraits of former presidents hanging in the White House. A plaque under the photo of President Barack Obama says he “was one of the most divisive political figures in American History,” who “passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act.”

Under a photograph of an autopen, with which Trump replaced the portrait of Biden, the plaque begins: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction….”

Ta.

December 18, 2025 (Thursday)

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

These were the first lines in a pamphlet that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that “the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled…do…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”

The nation’s founders went on to explain why it was necessary for them “​​to dissolve the political bands” which had connected them to the British crown.

They explained that their vision of human government was different from that of Great Britain. In contrast to the tradition of hereditary monarchy under which the American colonies had been organized, the representatives of the united states on the North American continent believed in a government organized according to the principles of natural law.

Such a government rested on the “self-evident” concept “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.” Governments were created to protect those rights and, rather than deserving loyalty because of tradition, religion, or heritage, they were legitimate only if those they governed consented to them. And the American colonists no longer consented to be governed by the British monarchy.

This new vision of human government was an exciting thing to declare in the heat of a Philadelphia summer after a year of skirmishing between the colonists and British regulars, but by December 1776, enthusiasm for this daring new experiment was ebbing. Shortly after colonists had cheered news of independence in July as local leaders read copies of the Continental Congress’s declaration in meetinghouses and taverns in cities and small towns throughout the colonies, the British moved on General George Washington and the troops in New York City.

By September the British had forced Washington and his soldiers to retreat from the city, and after a series of punishing skirmishes across Manhattan Island, by November the Redcoats had pushed the Americans into New Jersey. They chased the Continental Army all the way across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.

By mid-December, things looked bleak for the Continental Army and the revolutionary government it backed. The 5,000 soldiers with Washington who were still able to fight were demoralized from their repeated losses and retreats, and since the Continental Congress had kept enlistments short so as not to risk a standing army, many of the men would be free to leave the army at the end of the year, further weakening it.

As the British troops had taken over New York City and the Continental soldiers had retreated, many of the newly minted Americans outside the army were also having doubts about the whole enterprise of creating a new, independent nation based on the idea that all men were created equal. Then things got worse: as the American soldiers crossed into Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia on December 12 out of fear of a British invasion, regrouping in Baltimore (which they complained was dirty and expensive).

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”

The author of The American Crisis was Thomas Paine, whose January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense had solidified the colonists’ irritation at the king’s ministers into a rejection of monarchy itself, a rejection not just of King George III, but of all kings. In early 1776, Paine had told the fledgling Americans, many of whom still prayed for a return to the comfortable neglect they had enjoyed from the British government before 1763, that the colonies must form their own independent government.

Now he urged them to see the experiment through. He explained that he had been with the troops as they retreated across New Jersey and, describing the march for his readers, told them “that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.”

For that was the crux of it. Paine had no doubt that patriots would create a new nation, eventually, because the cause of human self-determination was just. But how long it took to establish that new nation would depend on how much effort people put into success. “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake,” Paine wrote. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”

In mid-December, British commander General William Howe had sent most of his soldiers back to New York to spend the winter, leaving garrisons across the river in New Jersey to guard against Washington advancing.

On Christmas night, having heard that the garrison at Trenton was made up of Hessian auxiliaries who were exhausted and unprepared for an attack, Washington and 2,400 soldiers crossed back over the icy Delaware River in a winter storm. They marched nine miles to attack the garrison, the underdressed soldiers suffering from the cold and freezing rain. Reaching Trenton, they surprised the outnumbered Hessians, who fought briefly in the streets before surrendering.

The victory at Trenton restored the colonists’ confidence in their cause. Soldiers reenlisted, and in early January they surprised the British at Princeton, New Jersey, driving them back. The British abandoned their posts in central New Jersey, and by March the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia. Historians credit the Battles of Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.

There is no hard proof that Washington had officers read The American Crisis to his troops when it came out six days before the march to Trenton, as some writers have said, but there is little doubt they heard it one way or another. So, too, did those wavering loyalists.

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

This past week feels like the final, chaotic days of a political era.

Last weekend was marred by horrific incidents of violence that drew attention even in a nation sadly accustomed to violence: a mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday that killed two people and wounded nine more; a mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, during a Hanukkah celebration that killed 15 people and wounded 40 others; and then on Sunday the news that beloved filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their home from knife wounds.

The Reiners’ deaths were immediately associated with a family member who struggles with addiction and mental health issues, but on Monday morning, President Donald Trump greeted the news with a social media post suggesting that their deaths were a result of Reiner’s political opposition to Trump.

The backlash to Trump’s statement was immediate and bipartisan, but Trump rejected calls to delete the post. Instead, before reporters, he doubled down on his criticism of the filmmaker who gave us This is Spinal Tap, A Few Good Men, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and so on, and who portrayed Michael “Meathead” Stivic on All in the Family during its nine-year run from 1971 to 1979.

On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published two articles based on eleven interviews journalist Chris Whipple conducted with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, revealing key members of the administration as a dysfunctional group of radical zealots making decisions haphazardly without any sense of public duty. The world Whipple portrayed looked so chaotic that Wiles promptly claimed she had been misrepresented, only to have Whipple note that everything he had quoted was on tape. The White House then appeared to pressure key members of the administration to reinforce the idea they were unified by posting on social media statements supporting Wiles.

On Wednesday, four Republicans in the House of Representatives joined all of the Democrats to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to hold a vote on extending the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act markets. Their willingness to force a vote on yet another issue Johnson was trying to avoid—the others were the Epstein Files Transparency Act and a measure to restore union rights to government employees—indicated both that Johnson’s power is shaky and that Republican lawmakers are feeling the heat over public concerns about the economy.

Also on Wednesday, former special counsel Jack Smith testified before the House Judiciary Committee, telling it that he and his team found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Smith had asked to testify in public, an offer Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) rejected. A New York Times article by Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim, recounting a phone call Trump made in late 2020 pressing David Ralston, then speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, to hold a special session to overturn Trump’s loss in the election, reinforced Smith’s testimony.

Then, Wednesday night, Trump spoke to the nation in what was supposed to be a speech about the economy as Americans are giving him poor marks on his handling of it. The speech was shorter than his usual, coming in at just under twenty minutes. Trump shouted his way through a rushed speech so full of lies that economist Paul Krugman said he couldn’t “find a single factual assertion Trump made that was true.” What Tom Nichols of The Atlantic saw was “an unnerving display of fear.”

As Nichols wrote, “Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job.” But there was more to it than just an indication of the president’s weakening poll numbers or declining mental acuity. It seemed to mark an end for the Reagan Revolution whose ideology Trump has pushed to its brutish conclusion.

When Trump yelled that he had “inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” and slammed “Radical Left Democrats,” Somali Americans, immigrants, and transgender Americans while claiming he “fights for the law-abiding, hardworking people of our country…who make this nation run, who make this nation work,” he was amping Republican rhetoric since the 1980s into caricature.

In the 1980s, Republicans told Americans that the modern government that had regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected civil rights, and stabilized the international order since World War II was “socialism.” Undeserving Americans like President Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens,” who were coded to be Black Americans from inner cities, or talk radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh’s “feminazis”—women who demanded equal rights—were cheating the system to take tax money from hardworking white taxpayers.

Cutting business regulations and taxes would usher in extraordinary economic growth that would boost the prosperity of hardworking Americans, they insisted, leaving behind those unwilling to work.

Except it didn’t. A February 2025 report from RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, written by Carter C. Price found that if the system in place before 1975 had stayed in place, the bottom 90% of Americans would have had almost $80 trillion more in 2023 than they did. When Democratic president Joe Biden took office in 2021, he set out to restore the economic system in place before 1981, protecting workers, boosting infrastructure investment, breaking up monopolies, and protecting consumers.

It worked. Far from being the economic “disaster” Trump claimed, the economy he inherited was, according to The Economist, “the envy of the world.” “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr wrote. If Trump had left that system in place, he would have gotten credit for a booming economy as the investments made under Biden took hold.

Instead, he undermined that government with dramatic layoffs and undermined that economy with tariffs, continued deregulation, and additional tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while cutting the tax credits that supported the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance markets. On Wednesday he was reduced to promising payments of $1,776 to military personnel, implying that money would come from tariffs. But fact checkers noted immediately that any such payments would come from money Congress appropriated to subsidize housing allowances for service members.

Trump’s false claims that Biden had left the U.S. to be “invaded by an army of 25 million people, many who came from prisons and jails, mental institutions and insane asylums,” and that under Biden we had “transgender for everybody, crime at record levels” exaggerated the rhetoric of “welfare queens” into open dehumanization.

Trump also echoed longstanding Republican claims that Democrats can win elections only by offering handouts to their voters or by cheating through voter fraud committed by undocumented immigrants, a charge that never had a shred of evidence. Trump took to its logical conclusion the idea that only Republicans could legitimately win elections on January 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the legitimate results of a presidential election.

Trump ’s panicked shouting at the American people seemed to recognize that Americans have turned against not just his economic policies, but also the ideology that underpinned them.

As it has lost the support of the people, the administration appears to be acting without regard to the law. On Thursday, Ellen Nakashima, Alex Horton, and Dan Lamothe reported in the Washington Post that the administration’s attacks on small boats coming from Venezuela were a redirection of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s determination to strike cartels in Mexico. Miller wanted to strike in Mexico to give the administration a quick win by stopping immigrants from coming across the border. But when the Mexican government slowed the activities of the cartels, the administration turned to attacking the boats from Venezuela.

“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” a government official told the Washington Post journalists. The official said Miller was behind the directive Trump signed in July authorizing lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups the administration called “designated terrorist organizations.” That directive accused those organizations of deliberately killing Americans with drugs, making them enemy combatants, a construction legal analysts say has no basis in the law.

Miller’s goals dovetailed with those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who wants to force Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, eager to demonstrate his competence after revealing classified information on a Signal chat, also got on board.

Now the administration’s goal is apparently Venezuela’s oil. On Wednesday, Miller posted on social media: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.” Last week, Trump told reporters: “We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water. And now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening.”

Also on Thursday, the administration reported that the “highly respected” board of the Kennedy Center, for the most part hand-picked by Trump, had voted “unanimously” to rename the performing arts center the “Trump-Kennedy Center” “because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.” Immediately, board member Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH) said there was nothing “unanimous” about it: she had been muted on the call and prevented from voting. Others noted that this name change is illegal: it is Congress that established the name of the Kennedy Center, and Congress must approve any name change.

On Friday, workers added Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center. Cable news host Chris Hayes noted that anyone removing the new letters could be arrested and charged with a crime, although that act “would be no more unlawful than what they’re doing right now.”

Meanwhile, House speaker Johnson sent congressional representatives home for the holidays, presumably to quiet the fights over extending the premium tax credits and to make sure his members weren’t there to comment about the release of the Epstein files, required by law on Friday.

On Friday—today—former special counsel Jack Smith asked the House Judiciary Committee to release his testimony about Trump’s participation in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election to the public. He says the American people should hear the facts of the criminal cases against Trump.

Today was also the deadline by which Congress, through the Epstein Files Transparency Act, required the administration to release all of the files compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a searchable format. Lawmakers forced that bill through the House thanks to a discharge petition, and then the Senate passed it overwhelmingly.

But the Department of Justice did not meet the requirements of the law. It announced midday it would release only some of the files. And then, when it did release some of them, they were so heavily redacted they clearly thwarted the intention of the law. Nashville, Tennessee, investigative reporter Phil Williams noted that the files were redacted in such a way that they would hide Trump and highlight Democrats: a search of the word “Clinton” delivered 109 hits while a search of the word “Trump” produced only two. This, despite a recent New York Times article about how they were best friends who bonded over their pursuit of women.

News outlets reported that the Department of Justice had redacted not just the names and identifying information of victims, but also of “politically exposed individuals and government officials.” The Epstein grand jury documents are simply 119 blacked-out pages. Republican representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, said the document release “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”

The second Trump administration has exposed the lie of Reaganomics, as well as the rot at the heart of an administration dedicated to the idea that some people are better than others. It has also shown the ridiculous cultlike behavior of those who adhere to that idea.

Former senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), who as the 2012 Republican presidential nominee talked to supporters about “makers” and “takers” in an embrace of the economic ideology of the Reagan years, published an op-ed in the New York Times today that appeared to acknowledge the political ideology of the past forty-five years has failed. He called for addressing the economic inequalities in the United States by placing higher taxes on the rich, people like him.

In a sign of which way the wind is blowing, Republican senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming announced today she would not run for reelection in 2026. So did Elise Stefanik (R-NY), elected to office as a moderate who then switched her allegiance to Trump to rise briefly to Republican leadership in the House. She is abandoning not just her run to become New York’s governor, but also any attempt at reelection to the House of Representatives.

This evening, the U.S. launched a massive attack on more than seventy suspected Islamic State targets in central Syria, in retaliation for the deaths of two U.S. Army soldiers and an interpreter last Saturday. “This is not the beginning of a war—it is a declaration of vengeance,” Defense Secretary Hegseth posted on social media. “The United States of America, under President Trump’s leadership, will never hesitate and never relent to defend our people…. Today, we hunted and we killed our enemies. Lots of them. And we will continue.”

Thanks Neo. I just remembered to check, but you were ahead of me.

:)

If this was a TV series, people would be tuning out, giving it a low score on IMDb, and complaining how unrealistic it is.

December 20, 2025 (Saturday)

On November 19, 2025, Congress passed H.R. 4405, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and although there was none of the usual publicity and fanfare President Donald Trump enjoys around a bill signing, the White House said that Trump signed it the same day, making it a law.

It required the United States Attorney General to “release all documents and records in possession of the Department of Justice relating to Jeffrey Epstein” no later than 30 days after the date the measure became law. It required that the Department of Justice “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices, that relate to: Jeffrey Epstein including all investigations, prosecutions, or custodial matters…. Ghislaine Maxwell…. Flight logs or travel records, including but not limited to manifests, itineraries, pilot records, and customs or immigration documentation, for any aircraft, vessel, or vehicle owned, operated, or used by Jeffrey Epstein or any related entity…. Individuals, including government officials, named or referenced in connection with Epstein’s criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity or plea agreements, or investigatory proceedings…. Entities (corporate, nonprofit, academic, or governmental) with known or alleged ties to Epstein’s trafficking or financial networks.”

It required the release of “ny immunity deals, non-prosecution agreements, plea bargains, or sealed settlements involving Epstein or his associates” and “ll communications, memoranda, directives, logs, or metadata concerning the destruction, deletion, alteration, misplacement, or concealment of documents, recordings, or electronic data related to Epstein, his associates, his detention and death, or any investigative files.” It demanded “ocumentation of Epstein’s detention or death, including incident reports, witness interviews, medical examiner files, autopsy reports, and written records detailing the circumstances and cause of death.”

The law established that the Department of Justice could withhold only information that was classified or that contained “personally identifiable information of victims or victims’ personal and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy”; images that “depict or contain child sexual abuse materials… would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary”; images that “depict or contain images of death, physical abuse, or injury of any person; or…contain information specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order.”

The law required that the Department of Justice must justify all redactions with “a written justification published in the Federal Register and submitted to Congress.”

Otherwise, it said, records could not be “withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
The deadline for the release of that information was yesterday, December 19.

In the afternoon, the department began to release the required materials. But despite the law’s specification that the department release ALL the records, it released just a fraction of the required materials, saying it would release more later. Missing were any of the FBI interviews with survivors or internal Justice Department memos about charging decisions.

There are very few images of Epstein with Trump, despite their close relationship. Instead, the files focused on former Democratic president Bill Clinton, whose office responded with a statement saying: “The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20–plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be. Even Susie Wiles said Donald Trump was wrong about Bill Clinton.”

And then there were the redactions. So much of the material was redacted that, in front of television cameras, Jake Tapper of CNN scrolled through an entirely-blacked-out 100-page document on his phone and said: “That’s the transparency we’re getting here.”

Today observers caught that for all that the Department of Justice had omitted materials the law required they produce, Justice Department staffers had inserted unrelated material: a photo of former Democratic president Bill Clinton, pop music star Michael Jackson, and music legend Diana Ross, with children, suggesting that the three were associated with sex abuser Jeffery Epstein. The image was quickly identified by social media users not as a private image from the Epstein files, but as a publicly available image from a 2023 fundraiser. The children were not Epstein victims, but rather Jackson’s and Ross’s own kids.

Then it turned out, as Michael R. Sisak and David B. Caruso of the Associated Press reported, at least 16 files that had initially been posted on the Justice Department’s public website have disappeared without explanation, including one that showed multiple photographs of Trump with Epstein.

Democratic lawmakers Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, released a statement yesterday after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the Department of Justice would not meet the deadline for the release of the Epstein files established by law.

“Donald Trump and the Department of Justice are now violating federal law as they continue covering up the facts and the evidence about Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long, billion-dollar, international sex trafficking ring,” the two wrote. “For months, Pam Bondi has denied survivors the transparency and accountability they have demanded and deserve and has defied the Oversight Committee’s subpoena. The Department of Justice is now making clear it intends to defy Congress itself, even as it gives star treatment to Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Courts around the country have repeatedly intervened when this Administration has broken the law. We are now examining all legal options in the face of this violation of federal law.”

Officials in the Trump administration have been treating members of Congress with contempt since Trump took office, deliberately flouting the 1974 Impoundment Act that prohibits presidents from unilaterally deciding to withhold funds Congress has appropriated, for example, and ignoring the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional approval for military actions that last more than 60 days.

Now, with their disregard for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, they are also treating voters, especially their own MAGA voters who stood behind Trump because he promised to release the Epstein files, with outright contempt.

Apologies for anything that looks like a typo…I cut and pasted this on an iPad, and it seems to have ignored letters that are between brackets in the original text.

Neophyte said:

Apologies for anything that looks like a typo…I cut and pasted this on an iPad, and it seems to have ignored letters that are between brackets in the original text.

‘SOK. Thanks for posting her letters. The world needs her sanity to prevail.

December 21, 2025 (Sunday)

Speaking today at Turning Point USA’s annual “AmericaFest” conference, Vice President J.D. Vance said, to great applause: “The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God we always will be, a Christian nation.”

Actually, we haven’t.

Vance’s statement flies in the face of our Constitution, whose First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, had quite a lot to say about why it was fundamentally important to make sure the government kept away from religion.

In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as Virginia arrested itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which our own Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—would be based. It reads, “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” he explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

Madison believed that a variety of religious sects would balance each other out, keeping the new nation free of the religious violence of Europe. He drew on that vision explicitly when he envisioned a new political system, expecting that a variety of political expressions would protect the new government. In Federalist #51, he said: “In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”

In 1790, the year after he took office as the nation’s first president, George Washington assured a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, that in the United States of America, “ll possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” The government of the United States, he wrote, “gives to bigotry no sanction” and “to persecution no assistance.” He wished that Jewish Americans “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants— while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

The next year, the states ratified the First Amendment to the Constitution. In order to ensure men had the right of conscience, it reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson called this amendment “a wall of separation between Church & State.” In a letter of January 1, 1802, he explained to a group of Baptists from Danbury, Connecticut, how that principle made him refuse to call for national religious days of fasting and thanksgiving in his role as head of the government.

Like Madison, he maintained that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.” “he legitimate powers of government reach actions only,” he wrote, “ not opinions.”

“hat act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’” he wrote, built “a wall of separation between Church & State.”

In the early years of the nation, Americans zealously guarded that wall. They strictly limited the power of the federal government to reflect religion, refusing even to permit the government to stop delivery of the U.S. mails on Sunday out of concern that Jews and Christians did not share the same Sabbath and the government could not choose one over the other. The Constitution, a congressional report noted, gave Congress no authority “to inquire and determine what part of time, or whether any has been set apart by the Almighty for religious exercises.”

But the Civil War marked a change. As early as the 1830s, southern white enslavers relied on religious justification for their hierarchical system that rested on white supremacy. God, they argued, had made Black Americans for enslavement and women for marriage, and society must recognize those facts.

A character in an 1836 novel written by a Virginia gentleman explained to a younger man that God had given everyone a place in society. Women and Black people were at the bottom, “subordinate” to white men by design. “All women live by marriage,” he said. “It is their only duty.” Trying to make them equal was a cruelty. “For my part,” the older man said, “I am well pleased with the established order of the universe. I see…subordination everywhere. And when I find the subordinate content…and recognizing his place…as that to which he properly belongs, I am content to leave him there.”

The Confederacy rejected the idea of popular government, maintaining instead that a few Americans should make the rules for the majority. As historian Gaines Foster explained in his 2002 book Moral Reconstruction, which explores the nineteenth-century relationship between government and morality, it was the Confederacy, not the U.S. government, that sought to align the state with God. A nation was more than the “aggregation of individuals,” one Presbyterian minister preached, it was “a sort of person before God,” and the government must purge that nation of sins.

Confederates not only invoked “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” in their Constitution, they established as their motto “Deo vindice,” or “God will vindicate.”

The United States, in contrast, was recentering democracy during the war, and it rejected the alignment of the federal government with a religious vision. When reformers in the United States tried to change the preamble of the U.S. Constitution to read, “We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the sources of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Ruler among nations, and His revealed will as of supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in order to form a more perfect union,” the House Committee on the Judiciary concluded that “the Constitution of the United States does not recognize a Supreme Being.”

That defense of democracy—the will of the majority—continued to hold religious extremists at bay.
Reformers continued to try to add a Christian amendment to the Constitution, Foster explains, and in March 1896 once again got so far as the House Committee on the Judiciary. One reformer stressed that turning the Constitution into a Christian document would provide a source of authority for the government that, he implied, it lacked when it simply relied on a voting majority. A religious amendment “asks the Bible to decide moral issues in political life; not all moral questions, but simply those that have become political questions.”

Opponents recognized this attempt as a revolutionary attack that would dissolve the separation of church and state, and hand power to a religious minority. One reformer said that Congress had no right to enact laws that were not in “harmony with the justice of God” and that the voice of the people should prevail only when it was “right.” Congressmen then asked who would decide what was right, and what would happen if the majority was wrong. Would the Supreme Court turn into an interpreter of the Bible?

The committee set the proposal aside.

Now, once again, we are watching a minority trying to impose its will on the majority, with leaders like Vice President J.D. Vance trying to rewrite American history.

Heather Cox Richardson

December 22, 2025 (Monday)

This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will build two new “Trump-class” battleships. As Lara Seligman and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal note, Trump has complained for years that America’s warships are “terrible-looking,” and has been involved in the design of the new “Golden Fleet.”

A former rear admiral who is director at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies told Seligman and Weisgerber that the Golden Fleet is “exactly what we don’t need.” The last battleship in history to be built was the HMS Vanguard, completed in 1946; the last battleship commissioned by the U.S. was the USS Missouri, which was decommissioned in the 1990s. The proposed ships are, he said, “focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

In an illustration of the new battleship provided by the White House, the vessel sports an image of Trump on its upper deck.

Trump seems to be focusing on creating a golden legacy for himself as the MAGA movement falters.

At a news conference today from Mar-a-Lago announcing the new Trump-class ships, Trump expressed concern that Americans were still talking about the Epstein files. “A lot of people are very angry that pictures are being released of other people that really had nothing to do with Epstein. But they’re in a picture with him because he was at a party, and you ruined a reputation of somebody,” Trump said. “A lot of people are very angry that this continues. A lot of Republicans,” he added.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the Justice Department to release all the files by Friday, but it has released only about 10,000 of what are apparently hundreds of thousands of documents, and those are heavily redacted. Department leaders are quite obviously covering up material, suggesting that what remains unknown is so hideous that Trump and his loyalists have concluded it’s better to break the law Congress passed to provide transparency, thus infuriating the MAGA base that voted for Trump because he lied that he would release the files, than to let anyone know what they’re hiding.

Former president Bill Clinton issued a statement today demanding that the Department of Justice follow the law and “produce the full and complete record the public demands and deserves.” The material the department has released implies that a major perpetrator of abuse in the files is Clinton. Today he noted that the department’s actions make it clear that “someone or something is being protected.” Clinton says he needs “no such protection” and calls “on President Trump to direct Attorney General Bondi to immediately release any remaining materials referring to, mentioning, or containing a photograph of Bill Clinton.”

In other words, as USA Today opinion columnist Michael J. Stern put it: “Bill Clinton just called Trump & Pam Bondi’s bluff.”

MAGA leaders are now openly fighting over its future. At this weekend’s Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Erika Kirk, the widow of the late Charlie Kirk, announced her support for Vice President J.D. Vance for president in 2028, although Trump has been handing out Trump 2028 hats. As recently as last week, Brian Schwartz of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has been talking with lawyer Alan Dershowitz about ways in which he could constitutionally serve a third term. (He cannot.)

As Andrew Howard of Politico reported, the conference featured infighting in which prominent podcaster Ben Shapiro called out right-wing influencers Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon, who have lately moved even further toward the Nazi far right as “frauds and grifters.” Meanwhile, prominent employees are leaving the Heritage Foundation after its right-wing leader, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson’s friendly interview with far-right Groyper leader Nick Fuentes. Many of those leaving Heritage are moving to former vice president Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom foundation, established in 2021 after Trump supporters called for Pence’s hanging. Pence’s shop rejects the trade walls, isolationism, and strongman rule of Trumpism.

That split is showing elsewhere. Ewan Palmer of The Daily Beast reported today that Texas senator and podcaster Ted Cruz is bad-mouthing Vance as he considers a 2028 presidential run, and notably, the state senators in Pence’s home state of Indiana recently rejected Trump’s demands that they redistrict the state in Trump’s favor.

And there is strong pushback to what appears to be last night’s attempt to censor the press.

On Sunday the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, pulled a 60 Minutes story about the Trump administration’s renditions of migrants to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador just hours before it was scheduled to air. The 60 Minutes story had undergone the normal process of vetting, fact-checking, and legal reviews. In an email to the newsroom, Weiss said she pulled the story, which focused on the torture the prisoners endured, because it did not present the administration’s justification for sending 252 migrants to CECOT.

Weiss took over the top editorship of CBS News in October after Paramount Skydance, owned by Trump loyalist David Ellison, bought her opinion website Free Press for $150 million. Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is currently in the midst of attempting a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. Yesterday, billionaire Larry Ellison, David Ellison’s father, personally guaranteed that he would stand behind more than $40 billion in financing required for the deal.

The 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, wrote in an email to her colleagues: “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now—after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Alfonsi also noted that the journalists had repeatedly asked for interviews with administration officials, who did not answer. “Government silence is a statement,” she wrote, “not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”

But it turned out that the segment had already been distributed in Canada, and copies of it appeared in the U.S. this afternoon. Legal analyst Asha Rangappa watched it and explained that it “debunks the fundamental claim used by Trump admin that the detainees it sent there are ‘terrorists’ and corroborates torture using clips from El Salvadorean influencers Bukele uses internally. Would be a shock to low information voters, probably.”

Journalist Parker Molloy, who covers the media and culture, observed: “People are going to get to see a totally normal news piece that clearly isn’t biased against Trump and think, ‘She was afraid that THIS would upset the administration??’”

Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote commented: “Had Bari Weiss just ran the story, it would have been seen by a couple million people tops. The bootleg has now gone viral, and may end up being the most-watched 60 Minutes segment ever.”

In a new YouGov poll conducted for The Economist, fewer than half of Republicans say they “strongly approve” of Trump, and only a third of Republicans approve strongly of his handling of inflation and prices.

All of this adds up to a president who thinks a lot about gold and his legacy. On Friday, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo observed that, these days, the political world around Trump “has a feeling of drift, spectacle and fragmentation. Trump’s ballroom epitomizes it—crass, stupid, vulgar, unacceptable and yet ultimately meaningless. It’s the full-size version of having his stacked Kennedy Center board, of which he is the chairman, rename the institution after him…. These all have the feeling of a man who is bored, tapped out, losing coherence and energy and who others are trying to keep distracted.”

Toria Sheffield of People magazine reports that at this weekend’s Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters told the audience that the ballroom President Donald J. Trump wants to build next to the White House is “four times the size of the White House.” According to Watters, Trump told him: “Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.”

https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/posts/pfbid0DbsC5ZYUANy6nMaySzcAqg4CA1gq4yDNP1tQdEDiitMjjttJmTLD7Dt2GS656Ebul

Link

Thank you CE.

ChrispenEvan said:

Heather Cox Richardson

December 22, 2025 (Monday)

This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will build two new “Trump-class” battleships. As Lara Seligman and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal note, Trump has complained for years that America’s warships are “terrible-looking,” and has been involved in the design of the new “Golden Fleet.”

A former rear admiral who is director at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies told Seligman and Weisgerber that the Golden Fleet is “exactly what we don’t need.” The last battleship in history to be built was the HMS Vanguard, completed in 1946; the last battleship commissioned by the U.S. was the USS Missouri, which was decommissioned in the 1990s. The proposed ships are, he said, “focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

In an illustration of the new battleship provided by the White House, the vessel sports an image of Trump on its upper deck.

Trump seems to be focusing on creating a golden legacy for himself as the MAGA movement falters.

——————-snip——————-

https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/posts/pfbid0DbsC5ZYUANy6nMaySzcAqg4CA1gq4yDNP1tQdEDiitMjjttJmTLD7Dt2GS656Ebul

Link

Thanks.

ChrispenEvan said:

Heather Cox Richardson

December 22, 2025 (Monday)

This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will build two new “Trump-class” battleships. … Trump told him: “Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.”

Battleships? Is he still in 1914?

Anyway, hasn’t Trump seen what they did to the statues of Saddam Hussein? What they are doing to moniments and statues of arseholes all over the world?

roughbarked said:

ChrispenEvan said:

SCIENCE said:

Divine Angel said:

Why does JFK’s head look like regurgitated potato chips stuck together with gravy

look we don’t know what’s wrong with all yous haters, the USSA is the country of freedom and happiness and decency and integrity, and that’s what makes it all right when an American does it

Heather Cox Richardson

December 22, 2025 (Monday)

This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will build two new “Trump-class” battleships. … Trump told him: “Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.”

Battleships? Is he still in 1914?

Anyway, hasn’t Trump seen what they did to the statues of Saddam Hussein? What they are doing to moniments and statues of arseholes all over the world?

good question, ¿ What they are doing to moniments and statues of arseholes all over the world

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

ChrispenEvan said:

Heather Cox Richardson

December 22, 2025 (Monday)

This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will build two new “Trump-class” battleships. … Trump told him: “Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.”

Battleships? Is he still in 1914?

Anyway, hasn’t Trump seen what they did to the statues of Saddam Hussein? What they are doing to moniments and statues of arseholes all over the world?

good question, ¿ What they are doing to moniments and statues of arseholes all over the world

Ah the moniments are left alone. It is the monuments that they are angle grinding off at the ankles.

December 23, 2025 (Tuesday)

On December 24, 2025, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, will celebrate seventy years of tracking Santa’s sleigh.

According to legend, the tradition of tracking Santa’s sleigh began in November 1955, when a child trying to reach Santa on a telephone hotline advertised by a Sears, Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado transposed two digits. It was not Santa who picked up the phone, but Colonel Harry Shoup of Continental Air Defense Command, known as CONAD, located in Colorado Springs.

Shoup was brusque when a small voice asked if he was Santa, but he later recognized that interest in Santa could be an opportunity to call public attention to the air defense system that would shield the U.S. if Soviet bombers were able to reach the country from over the North Pole. After World War II, many Americans were hoping to turn away from world affairs, but U.S. and Canadian leaders worried that North America was vulnerable to an attack from the USSR over the polar region. That wasn’t on many Americans’ radar screens.

A few weeks after the young child’s call, Shoup told his public-relations officer to inform the news wire services that CONAD was tracking Santa’s sleigh as it traveled from his home at the North Pole. Reporters loved the story, and the following year they called to see if the trackers would be operational again.

In 1957,* Canada and the U.S. formed the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD. By charting Santa’s ride, the agency illustrated the military’s mission to protect the citizens of the continent by tracking an object traveling from the North Pole, over the Arctic Ocean, to Canada, and beyond.

By Christmas Eve 1960, NORAD was posting updates and tracking the flight of “S. Claus.” It reported that the sleigh had made an emergency landing on the ice of Hudson Bay. When Canadian fighter jets stopped by to check on the incident, they found Santa tending to a reindeer’s injured foot. Once the animal was bandaged, the jets escorted Santa’s sleigh as he completed his annual flight. Since then, fighter jets have frequently intercepted the sleigh to salute Santa, who reins in his team to let the slower jets catch up.

Over time, NORAD became the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and its mission expanded to include collecting information about the Earth’s atmosphere, coastal waters, and intelligence. It is still key to U.S. and Canadian defense.

And what began in 1955 as a way to familiarize war-weary Americans with Cold War–era defense systems has become an operation in which more than 1,000 Canadian and American military personnel, Defense Department civilian workers, and local participants near Colorado Springs, where NORAD is headquartered, volunteer to answer the more than 100,000 phone calls that come from children around the world on Christmas Eve. It is a testament to the longstanding U.S.-Canadian friendship.

For one night a year, the hard-edged world of international alliances, intelligence, radar, satellites, and fighter jets turns into a night for adults to create a magical world for children.

December 24, 2025 (Wednesday)

Happy holidays to you all, however you celebrate…or don’t.

We are some of the lucky ones this year, with a roof over our heads, food on the table, and family and friends close to hand. We are blessed.

But it has not always been this way.

For those struggling this holiday season, a reminder, if it helps, that Christmas marks the time when the light starts to come back.

December 25, 2025 (Thursday)

The modern version of Santa Claus arrived in the United States in 1863, when he stopped at an army camp of Union soldiers in the January 3 issue of Harper’s Weekly. Cartoonist Thomas Nast drew Santa wearing striped pants and a jacket emblazoned with stars as he sat in a sleigh under a giant American flag.

The article accompanying the image explained to readers that the “right jolly old elf” that Clement Clarke Moore had described in his 1823 poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” didn’t simply visit children. As the picture showed, he was bringing packages to soldiers while they relaxed with athletic games—like trying to catch a greased pig—before their Christmas dinner.

Nast drew Santa holding a puppet that looked much like Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and the article explained that he was “entertaining the soldiers by showing them Jeff Davis’s future. He is tying a cord pretty tightly round his neck, and Jeff seems to be kicking very much at such a fate.”
Nast’s 1863 Santa told a specific story about America in that terrible moment.

Nast had come to New York City from Germany as a child, one of the about 1.5 million German immigrants who arrived in the US between 1830 and 1860. In the 1850s, those immigrants and their native-born sons were a crucial part of the coalition that formed the Republican Party.

Those men threw themselves into the cause of the United States during the Civil War. About 216,000 German immigrants fought for the Union, making up the largest ethnic group among the troops. Another 300,000 native-born men of German ancestry also joined up, for a total of about 526,000 soldiers, about a quarter of the soldiers fighting for the Union. Their support was vital for the survival of the United States.

But by 1863, enthusiasm for the war was flagging. A war that most thought would be quick and easy had dragged on for almost two years, and the early battles had favored the Confederacy. The German-born troops had brought their songs into the army, and it was a small step from honoring those cultural traditions to Nast bringing the Santa Claus from his own childhood in Bavaria to visit the troops of the United States Army at Christmas to raise their spirits.

This was the first visit of Nast’s Santa to the United States, but he reappeared more famously in 1881. In that incarnation, too, he recalled the Civil War armies, but this time he represented what they had won.

The immediate postwar years were unsettled even before the terrible financial crash that began in 1873, but by 1880, Americans were feeling flush and optimistic. The country’s new white-collar workers who kept the record books for the new railroad corporations or sold industrial products to local consumers had money and time to spend on leisure activities…and on their families.

They began to celebrate significant personal events with parties and gifts. Weddings were no longer small affairs in someone’s front parlor; now they were elegant occasions in a decorated church with a reception afterward, where guests ate pieces of a cake that had been decorated to look like the bride’s gown. For the first time, parents held parties for their child’s birthday, and those invited brought gifts for the guest of honor.

In 1881, Nast’s iconic Santa highlighted this cultural change. Printed in Harper’s Weekly before Christmas that year, his image of Santa was one of the widespread American prosperity the Union victory had ushered in. Santa was fat, indicating he had access to good food and lots of it. He was warmly dressed and beaming. He carried an armful of children’s toys, including a military belt with a buckle embossed with the letters “US.”

As Nast’s Santa showed, the new prosperity was a product of the victory of the United States in the Civil War. Just a year before, the 1880 election had seemed to bury the political power of former Confederates once and for all as voters had reaffirmed the results of the Civil War by electing James A. Garfield, a Lincoln Republican who defended Black rights. An assassin ended Garfield’s term shortly after it began, but with Democrats nonetheless recognizing that to win national elections they must turn away from old southern leaders, it seemed the war had finally fallen into the past.

And there was a Santa Claus in Harper’s Weekly that children could dream about, brought to the U.S. by the American soldiers as a skinny immigrant who fought to put down the rebellion that threatened the country’s survival and then grown fat and happy in its aftermath.

December 26, 2025 (Friday)

On Tuesday, December 23, the U.S. Supreme Court made a preliminary finding that President Donald J. Trump’s deployment of federalized National Guard troops in the Chicago area beginning in October was unlawful. Six of the nine justices held that the law Trump invoked to send in National Guard troops requires that a president first send in the regular U.S. military to execute the laws, and that the National Guard can be deployed only if the president remains “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

But, they noted, the circumstances under which the president can use the military against U.S. citizens are “exceptional.” The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the U.S. military from executing the laws “except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”

So, the justices concluded, “before the President can federalize the Guard…, he likely must have “statutory or constitutional authority to execute the laws with the regular military and must be ‘unable’ with those forces to perform that function. At this preliminary stage, the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois. The President has not invoked a statute that provides an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act.”

In an opinion concurring with the five justices who signed onto the majority opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh added a footnote addressing what have become known as “Kavanaugh stops.” In September the Supreme Court majority allowed immigration officers to stop individuals on the basis of their apparent race or ethnicity, speaking in Spanish or with an accent, working in certain sectors, or being present at certain locations, like an agricultural site—so-called racial profiling.

In his support for that decision, Kavanaugh wrote that when those individuals legally in the U.S. are stopped and questioned, “the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the U.S.”
Since then, as Chris Geidner of Law Dork recorded, U.S. citizens have repeatedly been threatened, beaten, and detained. Currently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is holding a 22-year-old Maryland woman, Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, for deportation, although she has produced a U.S. birth certificate and Maryland immunization records and her lawyer insists she is a U.S. citizen. ICE officials say the documents are not valid and she is in the country illegally.

In his concurrence in Tuesday’s decision, Kavanaugh added a footnote saying: “The Fourth Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force. Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”

On Wednesday, December 24, the Department of Justice posted on social media that it might take “a few more weeks” to release the Epstein files after announcing that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had just “uncovered over a million more documents potentially related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.” In fact, as Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote noted, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York were ordered to transfer all their files to Justice Department headquarters in January 2025.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) responded: “A Christmas Eve news dump of ‘a million more files’ only proves what we already know: Trump is engaged in a massive coverup. The question Americans deserve answered is simple: WHAT are they hiding—and WHY? Justice delayed is justice denied. Release the files. Follow the law.”
The Justice Department has not released many of the documents as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but those few that have come out reveal proof that Trump has been lying about his involvement with the convicted sex abuser Epstein.

As Sarah Fitzpatrick reported Wednesday in The Atlantic, Trump started his 2024 campaign with the announcement that he “was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island.” He blamed any reports of such visits on Democrats who were, he said, smearing him to hurt him politically.

But documents released on Tuesday show a January 7, 2020, email from a New York prosecutor saying that flight logs show that Trump “traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case. In particular, he is listed as a passenger on at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996, including at least four flights on which Maxwell was also present…. On one flight in 1993, he and Epstein are the only two listed passengers; on another, the only three passengers are Epstein, Trump, and then-20-year-old . On two other flights, two of the passengers… were women who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case.”

Emails from before Epstein’s 2019 arrest show investigators talking about “10 co-conspirators,” while a 2020 email suggests prosecutors had amassed considerable material to charge “co-conspirators,” but never did so. The document discussing those charges is redacted.
Trump was mentioned more than 100 times in the documents released on December 23.

And there is pressure on Trump coming from a different direction as well. On December 17, Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo of the Wall Street Journal reported that senators led by Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to the Justice Department and asked officials to explain why law enforcement officials never interviewed Epstein’s longtime attorney Darren Indyke or his accountant Richard Kahn when the officers were investigating Epstein’s sex trafficking.

The same Wall Street Journal reporters recently noted that the two men arranged fake marriages to keep women in the U.S., withdrew cash for Epstein in ways that avoided scrutiny, and sent payments to women who later claimed they had been sexually abused. As co-executors of Epstein’s estate, the men have control over the evidence in that estate and over Epstein’s more than $100 million in assets.

Representatives and staffers from the House Oversight Committee told journalist Fitzpatrick they are drafting subpoenas to learn more about the alleged co-conspirators. They are also drafting a resolution to hold Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt for her failure to make sure that the Department of Justice complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and are moving ahead with articles of impeachment against her.

Axios reported on December 23 that the White House has taken over the X account of the Justice Department, and on the same day, that account tried to undercut the new information by claiming that accusations in it are “unfounded and false.” But Trump’s behavior on December 25, Christmas, suggested otherwise.

Trump’s social media account posted: “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT, falsely claimed they had nothing to do with him, didn’t know him, said he was a disgusting person, and then blame, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who was actually the only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so. When their names get brought out in the ongoing Radical Left Witch Hunt (plus one lowlife ‘Republican,’ Massie!), and it is revealed that they are Democrats all, there will be a lot of explaining to do, much like there was when it was made public that the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax was a fictitious story—a total Scam—and had nothing to do with ‘TRUMP.’”

After misrepresenting the New York Times, he went on: “Now the same losers are at it again, only this time so many of their friends, mostly innocent, will be badly hurt and reputationally tarnished. But, sadly, that’s the way it is in the World of Corrupt Democrat Politics!!! Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas! President Donald J. Trump.”
Bill Kristol of The Bulwark wrote: “Donald Trump, basically acknowledging that so far at least he’s losing the fight over Epstein.” MeidasTouch noted: “This is what’s known as “consciousness of guilt.”

This evening, Trump posted: “Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax. When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc. The Dems are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country! The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein—Just another Witch Hunt!!!”

“I love the smell of panic in the evening,” former representative and Trump critic Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted over Trump’s screed. “Smells like… victory.”

Even before Trump’s evening post, in Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit noted that it seems “clear that there is likely something in the files that further incriminates” Trump, an observation with which scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder agreed. He added: “Horrible as the facts at hand are, there must be something else, something verging on the unimaginable.”

The slow drip of the Epstein files, Solnit writes, is “undermining loyalty to Trump as nothing else has, and it is an important part of how the Trump regime and the Republican Party are falling apart before our eyes. This does not mean that the Trumpists are powerless,” she continues, “they are flailing and grabbing for all the kinds of power that they can.”
But “Trump appears to be disintegrating, rotting, collapsing before our eyes, mentally and physically, and Republicans in Congress—first of all with the vote to release the Epstein files—are breaking from him.”

Neophyte said:

December 26, 2025 (Friday)

Trump’s social media account posted: “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT, falsely claimed they had nothing to do with him, didn’t know him, said he was a disgusting person, and then blame, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who was actually the only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so. When their names get brought out in the ongoing Radical Left Witch Hunt (plus one lowlife ‘Republican,’ Massie!), and it is revealed that they are Democrats all, there will be a lot of explaining to do, much like there was when it was made public that the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax was a fictitious story—a total Scam—and had nothing to do with ‘TRUMP.’”

After misrepresenting the New York Times, he went on: “Now the same losers are at it again, only this time so many of their friends, mostly innocent, will be badly hurt and reputationally tarnished. But, sadly, that’s the way it is in the World of Corrupt Democrat Politics!!! Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas! President Donald J. Trump.”
Bill Kristol of The Bulwark wrote: “Donald Trump, basically acknowledging that so far at least he’s losing the fight over Epstein.” MeidasTouch noted: “This is what’s known as “consciousness of guilt.”

This evening, Trump posted: “Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax. When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc. The Dems are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country! The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein—Just another Witch Hunt!!!”

“I love the smell of panic in the evening,” former representative and Trump critic Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted over Trump’s screed. “Smells like… victory.”

Even before Trump’s evening post, in Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit noted that it seems “clear that there is likely something in the files that further incriminates” Trump, an observation with which scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder agreed. He added: “Horrible as the facts at hand are, there must be something else, something verging on the unimaginable.”

The slow drip of the Epstein files, Solnit writes, is “undermining loyalty to Trump as nothing else has, and it is an important part of how the Trump regime and the Republican Party are falling apart before our eyes. This does not mean that the Trumpists are powerless,” she continues, “they are flailing and grabbing for all the kinds of power that they can.”
But “Trump appears to be disintegrating, rotting, collapsing before our eyes, mentally and physically, and Republicans in Congress—first of all with the vote to release the Epstein files—are breaking from him.”

Smells of guilt.

That’s not the only thing he smells of.

TIL Heather describes her political views as “Lincoln-era Republican”.

December 27, 2025 (Saturday)

Over the Christmas holiday, the Trump administration threw its weight against the U.S. Constitution in favor of Christian nationalist authoritarianism.

The Framers of the Constitution established the United States of America on the rule of law, rejecting any religious qualifications for office or religious legal doctrine. They recognized that the establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

In the First Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791 as one of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, the new Americans agreed that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

To that, sometimes under pressure, the nation has held. It is central to what it means to be an American.
And yet, on December 25, 2025, a religious holiday for many Christians, the Trump administration attacked that American principle to claim the U.S. is a Christian nation. As Ashley Ahn of the New York Times chronicled, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted: “The joyous message of Christmas is the hope of Eternal Life through Christ.” The Labor Department posted: “Joy to the World. Let Earth Receive Her King.”

On December 24, over a video of officials wishing Americans Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Holidays, the Department of Homeland Security posted: “Christ is Born!” Over another video featuring iconic Christmas movies and scenes made up almost exclusively of white Americans and including several images of President Donald J. Trump, DHS posted: “Merry Christmas, America. We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.” On December 25, over a video of iconic American scenes with “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” playing, DHS posted: “Rejoice America, Christ is born!”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted: “Merry Christmas to all. Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. May His light bring peace, hope, and joy to you and your families.”

At 6:46 on Christmas evening, Trump’s social media account posted: “Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries! I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was. The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing. Under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper. May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”

As foreign policy journalist Anne Applebaum noted, rhetorically, “Not sure I understand why the Trump administration cares about Christians in Nigeria and not Christians in Ukraine.”
The Guardian explained yesterday that for years now, the U.S. right wing has insisted that Islamist terrorist groups are persecuting Christians in Nigeria. Those claims motivate Trump’s political base, the people he is depending on to stick with him as the rest of the country turns away.

Earlier this year, Trump designated the West African nation a “country of particular concern” under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act and warned he might go in “guns-a-blazing” if the Nigerian government didn’t stop what he claimed was the “killing of Christians.

Nigerian officials have pushed back on the idea that Christians are suffering at the hands of extremist groups more than people of other faiths. Nigeria has no official religion: Muslims make up about 53% of the population and Christians 45%, with the rest of the country’s population tending to follow traditional African religions. Most analysts agree that the violence in Nigeria is complex, often rooted in competition for water or land but exacerbated by ethnic and religious differences. In the northwest, The Guardian explains, heavily armed criminal gangs kidnap both Muslims and Christians and raid both Christian and Muslim communities.

Nimi Princewill of CNN reported that Nigerian president Bola Tinubu had given Rubio the “go ahead” for the strikes, apparently to hit camps of militants, but Nigerian foreign minister Yusuf Tuggar said the operation was not about religion but about trying to ensure safety for Nigerian civilians.

Nonetheless, Trump supporters cheered the strikes. Far-right activist Laura Loomer posted: “I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Christmas than by avenging the death of Christians through the justified mass killing of Islamic terrorists. You’ve got to love it! Death to all Islamic terrorists! Thank you.” “Amazing Christmas present by !” Representative Randy Fine (R-FL) posted. “With Muslim terrorists attacking Christians in Nigeria, Syria, and even Europe—simply for refusing to submit to Islam—the President is showing that we will no longer tolerate these barbarians.”

Trump needs right-wing evangelical voters in order to stay in office, as protection from possible legal exposure but also to continue the pattern of “extortion, conquest, and theft” Will Saletan of The Bulwark identified yesterday. Saletan noted that “as president, reduces every question to money.” What he can make from a deal determines both his domestic policy and foreign policy.

As Saletan puts it: “He arm-twists companies into giving the government a chunk of their stock. He withholds food stamps as a bargaining chip. He calls low-income housing an offense against rich people. He muses about awarding himself $1 billion from the Treasury.” His approach to foreign policy is to see what land or resources he and his cronies can grab by leveraging the economic or military power of the United States of America.

On December 23, Rebecca Ballhaus, Josh Dawsey, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal examined Trump’s use of the president’s pardoning power to cash in, with “lobbyists close to Trump” saying that “their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million.” Some of those eager for a presidential pardon have offered lobbyists as much as $6 million if they succeed.

The Justice Department’s former pardon attorney, Liz Oyer, was fired in March. She told the Wall Street Journal reporters that Trump “appears to be considering political, personal and financial interests and not the interests of the American public,” subverting the pardon process.

If his presidency gives Trump legal protection and the ability to grift, what Trump’s right-wing supporters get from his presidency is the promise of overturning traditional American values in favor of imposing white Christian nationalism on the rest of the country.

In addition to its Christian messaging at Christmas, DHS posted, “This Christmas, our hearts grow as our illegal population shrinks,” over a video of “Christmas after Mass Deportations.” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shared an AI video of Santa Claus putting on a bulletproof vest, then handcuffing an immigrant, processing the person, and then loading them onto an “ICE” plane for deportation.

On December 22, Brian Lyman of the Alabama Reflector noted that the determination to purge the country of “others” is not limited to those in the administration. Last week, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) escalated his attacks on Muslim Americans to demand their mass deportation. Tuberville has made it clear, Lyman wrote, “that he works for a very white, very Christian and very wealthy sliver of the population of Alabama.”

Tuberville “considers large numbers of people who live here aliens or threats to public safety” and is running for governor. He has tried to downplay his threats, saying his critics are overreacting or, as he calls it, “pearl-clutching.” But “no one should treat this as one of Tuberville’s many stupid, provocative statements with no follow-through” or pretend “it’s performative…r even grimly funny.” If elected, Lyman notes, “he will have access to law enforcement resources and the ability to act on his paranoia.”

“Just the threat of that should give you pause.”

On Christmas Day, Republican Indiana state senator Chris Garten posted AI images of himself punching, kicking, and body-slamming Santa Claus in front of the state capitol. His explanation for the images was that he was reacting to the “fact” that “the North Pole is trying to bring more bureaucratic overreach & unfunded mandates down the chimney disguised as ‘Christmas cheer.’” “We The People run Indiana, not the bureaucrats,” he wrote. “Take it back to the North Pole big guy.”

Garten called outrage over the posts “fake” and “a stark reminder of how overly sensitive society has become.” He later blasted the “intolerance, swearing, and outrage” over the images and said: “Some of you clowns are just insufferable…. Merry Christmas, snowflakes!”

wait so they were lying when they said in god they trust, until this week when they finally truly in god trusted

December 28, 2025 (Sunday)

On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated weapons for themselves.

As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.

Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.

As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.

What haunts me is the night of December 28.

On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.

In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka’s band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, Army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.
Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.

But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka’s band. The encounter didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with Army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.
By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn’t sit up. Blood dripped from his nose. Soldiers lifted him into an Army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent Army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.

And the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again.
In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakotas in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Lakotas’ encampment from a slight rise above the camp.

For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?

On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.

But it is never too late to change the future

December 29, 2025 (Monday)

In an appearance on New York’s WABC radio on Friday, President Donald J. Trump told billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis and co-host Rita Cosby: “We just knocked out—I don’t know if you read or you saw—they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.”

Officials said Trump was referring to a drug facility in Venezuela. But as Tyler Pager and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had no comment, and military officials said they had no information to share. Pager and Barnes added: “U.S. officials declined to specify anything about the site the president said was hit, where it was located, how the attack was carried out or what role the facility played in drug trafficking. There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government or any other authorities in the region.”

The reporters also noted that Venezuela is not a major producer of narcotics. It primarily traffics cocaine from Colombia. Meanwhile, Max Bearak, Simón Posada, and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times reported today that in the wreckage left behind by one of the U.S. strikes on what the administration calls “narco-terrorists” were bodies, charred fuel containers, life jackets, and packets, most of which were empty, although a few had “traces of a substance that looked and smelled like marijuana.”

At Mar-a-Lago today, Trump said: “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs. They load up the boats with drugs. So we hit all the boats and now we hit the area, it’s the implementation area. That’s where they implement. And that is no longer around.” Trump declined to say who was responsible for the operation. “I know exactly who it was, but I don’t want to say who it was,” he said. “But you know it was along the shore.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who usually posts video of military strikes on social media, posted nothing about the strike Trump mentioned, although at 4:01 this afternoon, U.S. Southern Command posted that it had struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, killing another two men. The new strike means that the U.S. military has killed more than 100 individuals in an operation widely condemned as illegal.

Tonight, Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Jim Sciutto of CNN reported that earlier this month, the CIA struck a remote Venezuelan port facility with drones, the first known U.S. attack on targets inside Venezuela. The U.S. says the Tren de Aragua gang was using the dock to store drugs and then to move them onto boats for reshipment. No one was at the facility when it was hit.

Sources told the CNN journalists that U.S. Special Operations Forces provided intelligence for the operation, but a spokesperson for U.S. Special Operations Command denied that allegation. The CIA declined to comment.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “It’s a good commentary on 2025 that the US President announces a major military attack on a foreign country and even the straightest arrows think, 50% chance it’s an attack, 50% chance president is on another cognition bender.”

Saturday morning, the day before Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was scheduled to meet with Trump for talks on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. The missile and drone strikes damaged more than ten residential buildings, killed at least one person who burned to death, and wounded 27 more, including two children.

When Zelensky arrived in Miami for his trip to Mar-a-Lago, there were no U.S. officials on hand to greet the plane. This was a deliberate snub, especially when compared to the literal red carpet Trump had U.S. military personnel roll out for Putin when he arrived on U.S. soil in August, followed by Trump greeting him while clapping, a military flyover, and a ride with Trump in the presidential limousine.

Trump’s preference for Putin was evident yesterday, too, when he posted on social media: “I just had a good and very productive telephone call with President Putin of Russia prior to my meeting, at 1:00 P.M. today, with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine.” He later told reporters that he and Putin talked for more than two hours.

At the meeting itself, Trump later told reporters, the negotiating teams “covered—somebody would say 95 percent, I don’t know what percent—but we have made a lot of progress on ending that war.” He once again referred to his fictional claims of being a peacemaker, adding: “I’ve settled eight wars, and this is the most difficult one.”

But, as Luke Harding of The Guardian noted, there is no sign that Putin is backing off from his extreme demands, including that Ukraine must give Russia much of its eastern territory. Trump’s negotiators suggest that such a concession would satisfy Putin, but skeptics doubt it. As White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Chris Whipple in August in an interview for Vanity Fair, “The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy.” But, she said: “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country.”

Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has lasted almost four years and, as Russian troops have routinely attacked civilian areas and civilian infrastructure, the damage to the country has been extreme. After meeting with Zelensky, Trump answered a reporter who asked whether Trump had spoken to Putin about the reconstruction of Ukraine: “I did. I did. They’re going to be helping. Russia’s going to be helping. Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed. Once—it sounds a little strange but I was explaining to the president, President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity, and other things at very low prices. So a lot of good things came out of that call today.”

Quite literally, Russia invaded Ukraine and continues to smash it. As former Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted on social media: “With all this talk of how to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, and a cease fire, keep this in mind: If Ukraine ceases firing, Ukraine will cease to exist. If Russia ceases firing, the war will cease to exist.”

In his comments to reporters, one passage perhaps shed more light on events than Trump intended. Defending the idea that Putin, who is bombing Ukraine in an unprovoked assault, wants peace, Trump said: “I saw a very interesting President Putin today. I mean, he—he wants to see it happen, he wants to see it. He told me, very strongly. I believe him. Don’t forget, we went through the Russia Russia Russia hoax together. And he’d call me, I’d call him, I’d say, ‘Can you believe the stuff that they’re making up?’ And it turned out we were right. They made it all up, and despite that, we didn’t get into wars, or we didn’t get into problems, but we weren’t able to trade very much or any of that, which was a shame, because, you know, a lot of success could have been had by trading with Russia. They have great land, great minerals and other things, and we have things that they want very badly, but the Russia Russia Russia hoax, which was a terrible made-up fictional thing by crooked Hillary and by Adam Shifty Schiff and bad people, sick people. They made it up. It was all a made up hoax.”

But, of course, the idea that Russian operatives worked to put Trump into the White House in 2026 wasn’t a hoax.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by a Republican, unanimously concluded that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence…the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” Further, Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort’s close relationship with “Russia-aligned oligarchs in Ukraine” meant that his “proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services…represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

In 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would not consider lifting the sanctions placed on Russia after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea. Although Republicans at the time supported those sanctions, it was not clear that Trump was as firm. Lifting sanctions was part of the story of Russian support for Trump in 2016.

The Senate committee and Special Counsel Robert Mueller put more of the story together, explaining that in summer 2016, Manafort and Russian operatives “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.” The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”

“All that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D T saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process,” wrote a Russian operative. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.

Trump has continued to pressure Zelensky into accepting that plan, so far without success. But Trump’s statement to reporters also suggests that with Russia’s economy crumpling under the weight of four years of war, Putin is desperate to grab Ukraine’s industrial regions and get rid of the sanctions under which his country has staggered since 2014 and especially since his second invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In late November, Russia began to sell its gold reserves in order to fund its budget.

Trump told reporters he had had another “very good talk” with Putin this morning, after his Sunday meeting with Zelensky.

Whether because of Trump’s or Putin’s weakening position—or both—both Trump and Putin appear to be eager to close the deal.

Neophyte said:

December 29, 2025 (Monday)

Whether because of Trump’s or Putin’s weakening position—or both—both Trump and Putin appear to be eager to close the deal.

Trump because he wants his bane name on ending a war.

Putiin because resources are getting stretched and he still wants ALL of Ukraine. He really isn’t going to settle for anything wlse else.

December 30, 2025 (Tuesday)

The hallmark of the first year of President Donald J. Trump’s second term has been the attempt of the president and his cronies to dismantle the constitutional system set up by the framers of that document when they established the United States of America. It’s not simply that they have broken the laws. They have acted as if the laws, and the Constitution that underpins them, don’t exist.

As soon as the 2024 election results were clear, billionaire Elon Musk, who had supported Trump’s campaign both through his purchase of Twitter—now X—and with $290 million in cash, posted on social media: “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” Latin for “New World Order.” Although he won with less than 50% of the vote, Trump announced that he had an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” Musk would head a new “Department of Government Efficiency” that Musk vowed would cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.

Musk and his operatives muscled their way into government offices and gained access to computer systems. With strokes of a keyboard they eliminated jobs and programs, including, as Musk put it, feeding “into the wood chipper” most of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government agency aimed at combating disease and malnutrition around the globe. That dismantling has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, recently concluded that while the Department of Government Efficiency did not actually reduce spending, it did cut almost 10% of federal employees, a key goal of Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025.

And, crucially, it put operatives in virtually all government departments and agencies, where they gained access to privileged information about Americans, including citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants.

Musk and DOGE also established the idea that the unelected officials in the Trump administration could do whatever they wished, without regard to the laws or the Constitution. The Constitution, judicial precedent, and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act all make it very clear that the power of the purse belongs to Congress. As the elected representatives of the American people, only members of the House of Representatives and the Senate can determine how the nation’s money is spent. Then the president must “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Democrats objected to the administration’s dramatic usurpation of the power of Congress, but Republicans did not complain. Most backed the administration’s claims it was eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Although Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, meaning that Trump should have been able to get any legislation he wanted, he continued to try to get around the Constitution by declaring nine “emergencies” that would permit him to act without congressional oversight. This reliance on emergencies reflected the ideas of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings were followed by right-wing leaders, including billionaire Peter Thiel and the man who influenced him, Curtis Yarvin. Schmitt argued that power belongs to the leader who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law.

Trump asserted this view on August 26, claiming “the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in these cities—I can do it.” As now–Vice President J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there’s just power.”

Under these so-called emergencies, Trump launched a tariff war in April, taking from Congress a right the Constitution reserves to it alone. When lawmakers moved to challenge those tariffs, House Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), declared the rest of the session a single day with regard to legislation that could challenge Trump’s declaration of an emergency so that a required number of days could not pass before a vote to end that emergency.

With momentum still seeming to be behind Trump, Republicans delivered an omnibus law in July that put into practice the ideology Republicans had promised for a generation. The measure that Trump called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” extended the 2017 tax cuts that benefited primarily the wealthy and corporations while cutting Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and support for the purchase of healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. By passing it under the terms of budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered, the Republicans pushed it through without any Democratic votes. In the Senate, three Republicans voted against the bill, requiring Vance to cast the deciding vote.

Meanwhile, administration policies put money into the pockets of the rich, especially Trump, who leveraged tariff discussions to win permissions to build golf courses, invested in cryptocurrency, and received donations to various projects from people with business before the government. When Congress tried to exercise its duty of oversight, administration officials treated the members with contempt, refusing to appear or declining to answer questions, talking over them, or insulting them.

But despite the administration’s attempt to act extraconstitutionally and outside the law, the law began to assert itself. Beginning in February 2024, long before the election, Democratic attorneys general had begun to write lawsuits challenging the executive orders and policies Trump’s appointees had boasted would be coming. Judges began to decide against the administration in those lawsuits at the same time that Americans vocally objected to the dramatic cuts to the civil service, the breaching of privacy laws by DOGE staffers, and the end of government services they had never imagined losing.

Then, in March, the government rendered more than 230 immigrants, mostly Venezuelans and nearly half with legal status in the U.S., to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador after a federal judge told them not to. Among those sent was Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García, whom a judge had ordered not be returned to El Salvador out of concern for his safety. The administration’s consistent refusal to bring Ábrego García back, despite the orders of a federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court, helped to focus anger at the administration.

The slow pace of the law inspired the American people to speak out against the administration. Protests had begun with “Tesla Takedowns” to weaken Musk, and they continued to grow as people watched their public services and government agencies dismantled. On April 5 a coalition of civil rights organizations, women’s rights’ groups, labor unions, and protesters participated in “Hands Off” rallies around the country.

Meanwhile, sweeping deportation raids illustrated that Trump’s promise to deport “the worst of the worst” criminal undocumented immigrants he insisted were raping and murdering U.S. citizens was a lie. Masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol were arresting foreign students who had spoken out against U.S. policy on Israel/Palestine and all the undocumented immigrants they could find. By definition, this meant they were grabbing people who were well integrated into communities. Few had been charged or convicted of crimes.

Trump’s 79th birthday fell on the same day as the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army—June 14—and he planned a military parade around that event in Washington, D.C. Protesters organized their own events that day, announcing they wanted “No Kings” in the United States of America. Trump’s popularity was dropping.

In June, Trump sent federalized National Guard troops to Los Angeles along with Marines, against the wishes of Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom, allegedly to protect federal officials and buildings from violence by those protesting deportation raids. In September, Trump deployed National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, and in October, to Chicago.

Support for Trump’s policies continued to drop. And then, over Labor Day weekend, Trump disappeared for several days. Whatever had happened passed, but the president’s deteriorating health, both physical and mental, was an increasingly major story.

The momentum that had appeared to carry the Trump administration forward had stopped. In October, Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich highlighted that Yarvin thought nothing had gone far enough or fast enough and feared that the “second Trump revolution…is failing. It is failing because it deserves to fail. It is failing because it spends all its time patting itself on the back. It is failing because its true mission, which neither it nor (still less) its supporters understand, is still as far beyond its reach as algebra is beyond a cat.”

On Saturday, October 18, more than seven million people took to the streets in another “No Kings” day to demonstrate their opposition to the Trump administration. On Monday, October 20, Trump began to bulldoze the East Wing of the White House, the People’s House.

Meanwhile, the refusal of Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the Epstein files—materials from the FBI’s investigation into the activities of sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein—had created significant pressure on Congress to force the administration’s hand. Many MAGA Republicans had backed Trump in 2024 because of what they thought was a promise to release those files, and yet House speaker Johnson refused to allow the House to vote on a measure requiring their release.

A bipartisan team of representatives launched a discharge petition to bring such a measure to a vote, and they overrode his objection. On November 19, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files to the public no later than December 19. The vote was overwhelming—a significant break of Republicans from Trump.

The administration failed to meet that legal deadline. But even the material that the Department of Justice has released and that has emerged from additional reporting since then offers evidence that Trump was more deeply involved with Epstein and his activities than he has admitted. Just tonight, the Wall Street Journal revealed that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa sent young women to perform massages, manicures, and spa services at Epstein’s nearby house, where Epstein would expose himself and pressure them for sex, and that Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell used the spa to recruit women to give Epstein massages.

On December 22 a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to file a plan to return the men it sent to CECOT or to hold hearings to permit them to challenge their detention, insisting they have the right to due process.

On December 23 the Supreme Court issued a preliminary rejection of Trump’s justification for deploying National Guard troops in Illinois.

As we reach the end of 2025, it appears the law is catching up to an administration that began the year by acting as if the law and the Constitution didn’t exist.

More than that, though, over the course of 2025, the administration’s refusal to recognize the tenets of American democracy has roused the American people to defend that democracy.

It appears that as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when British colonists on the North American continent took the radical step of rejecting the idea not just of King George III but of all kings, and launched the experiment of government based on the rule of law created by the people themselves, the American people are reclaiming that history.