“EXCLUSIVE: American Academy of Pediatrics loses HHS funding after criticizing RFK Jr.”
“HHS cuts key AAP grants, citing concerns about “identity-based language” and insufficient focus on agency priorities. The organization said the cuts could harm child health.”
The Department of Health and Human Services has terminated seven grants totaling millions of dollars to the American Academy of Pediatrics, including for initiatives on reducing sudden infant deaths, improving adolescent health, preventing fetal alcohol syndrome and identifying autism early, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The abrupt loss of funds this week surprised the professional pediatrician association, which has been one of the harshest critics of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s changes to federal vaccine policy.
“The sudden withdrawal of these funds will directly impact and potentially harm infants, children, youth, and their families in communities across the United States,” Mark Del Monte, AAP’s chief executive and executive vice president, said in a statement to The Post. The organization is exploring options to push back, he said, including a legal challenge. […]
Three of the terminated grants had been awarded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; four others had been awarded by the Health Resources and Services Administration, another health agency.
“This vital work spanned multiple child health priorities, including reducing sudden infant death, rural access to health care, mental health, adolescent health, supporting children with birth defects, early identification of autism, and prevention of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, among other topics,” Del Monte said. […]
“Venezuela’s Navy Begins Escorting Ships as U.S. Threatens Blockade”
Venezuela’s government has ordered its Navy to escort ships carrying petroleum products from port, escalating the risk of a confrontation with the United States after President Trump ordered a “blockade” aimed at the country’s oil industry.
Several ships sailed from the country’s east coast with a naval escort between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, according to three people familiar with the matter. The vessels departed just hours after Mr. Trump said he intended to blockade sanctioned oil tankers that do business with Venezuela.
The ships — transporting urea, petroleum coke and other oil-based products — left the Port of José bound for Asian markets […]
[…] a U.S. official, said Washington was aware of escorts and was considering various courses of action, but declined to provide details.
Venezuela’s state oil company, known as PDVSA, said in a statement on Wednesday that ships connected to its operations were continuing to sail “with full security, technical support and operational guarantees in legitimate exercise of their right to free navigation.”
Mr. Trump had announced on Tuesday evening that he was imposing a “total and complete blockade” of tankers to and from Venezuela that had violated U.S. trade sanctions. Roughly 40 percent of the tankers that have transported Venezuelan crude in recent years have been placed under U.S. sanctions, according to Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com.
U.S. law enforcement officials last week seized an Asia-bound sanctioned tanker carrying nearly two million barrels of Venezuelan crude, a major escalation of Mr. Trump’s standoff with Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, whose government derives the bulk of its revenues from oil exports.
U.S. officials have said in private in recent days that additional tankers carrying Venezuelan oil may be seized, without providing additional details.
Mr. Maduro has reacted to the seizure with anger and vowed to keep the oil exports flowing at all cost, said one of the three people.
birgerjohanssonsays
CNN: “Former Swedish Prime Minister on how to end the Ukraine war”
Remember, Carl Bildt is a conservative, but he is rejecting everything Trump stands for (it does not come up in this interview but he is no enemy of immigration).
birgerjohanssonsays
Yes! The new Skepticrat has arrived, together with Noah, Heath Eli and Mike Marshall decanting absurd news.
Despite holding one of the smallest House majorities in history, Republicans muscled their health care bill through the chamber on Wednesday — a politically important win aimed at blunting Democratic attacks on affordability, but one that is largely symbolic, with the legislation likely to languish in the Senate.
The House passed the package of conservative health proposals, 216-211, with all but one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., supporting the bill. All Democrats opposed.
Notably, the bill doesn’t address the expiring Obamacare subsidies, meaning that even if the Senate were to sign off — which again, isn’t likely to happen — millions of Obamacare enrollees would still see their premiums skyrocket on Jan. 1.
Instead, the House GOP proposal incorporates a grab bag of conservative priorities, including expanded association health plans, cost-sharing reductions in the ACA marketplace and new transparency requirements for pharmacy benefit managers.
Top Republican leaders insist the bill would lower premiums for “all Americans.” But compared with the looming increases facing Obamacare enrollees, any potential savings would be marginal. And that assumes the bill somehow becomes law — a long shot given Democratic opposition and the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
As House Republicans acted publicly on a proposal going nowhere, however, a key group of more moderate lawmakers in both chambers were working behind the scenes on a bill that could go somewhere.
While that proposal still doesn’t quite exist — and just about everyone on Capitol Hill acknowledges it won’t come in time to avert the steep increases in Obamacare premiums — there’s a chance lawmakers could deliver something early next year that would alleviate some of the rising premiums.
Members of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus met with key senators in the basement of the Capitol on Wednesday, as moderate Democrats and Republicans searched for an elusive compromise on the subsidies.
The plan, according to Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa. — who co-chairs the Problem Solvers Caucus — is for the House to send the Senate a three-year Obamacare extension, and then for the Senate to take up the product, make changes, and then send it back to the House.
[…] After Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., blocked several amendments to the health care bill that would have extended the subsidies in some form — an important vote for numerous vulnerable Republicans looking to distance themselves from the GOP strategy of letting the tax credits expire — four House Republicans broke from GOP leaders and signed a discharge petition to force a vote on a Democratic proposal to extend the subsidies for three years. Those four signatures were enough to clinch the 218 mark required to force the vote.
The four moderate Republicans who signed on — Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., Robert Bresnahan, R-Pa., Ryan Mackenzie, R-Pa., and Fitzpatrick — all face difficult reelection bids in next year’s midterms and wanted a chance to vote on the subsidies.
“We did what was in the interest of my bosses back home,” Fitzpatrick told reporters.
Lawler argued the procedural step of signing the discharge petition wasn’t “an endorsement of the bill written,” explaining that he wants to see changes made to the subsidies.
“But when leadership blocks action entirely, Congress has a responsibility to act,” Lawler said.
[…] Democrats are hopeful that the combination of the discharge petition and voters paying higher premiums next month may finally shake loose a deal.
As Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., put it: ”The pressure on the Senate will be so enormous that I think the winds will change.”
But the communications director for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., is already throwing cold water on the prospect.
“A clean, three-year extension of the Biden COVID bonuses was on the Senate floor last week, and it failed,” Ryan Wrasse posted on X.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, backed up that assessment, telling reporters that they “already saw that movie” when the Senate tried — and failed — to advance a three-year extension.
“We’re not going to do a straight up extension for three years without reforms,” Moreno said.
But Moreno was also somewhat bullish on the ability of lawmakers to find some sort of agreement.
“I would say we’re not in the red zone, but we’re in the field goal range,” Moreno told MS NOW on Wednesday afternoon.
What that product will look like, however, and if the House would ever stage a vote on the final proposal, is anyone’s guess.
Lawmakers in both chambers have proposed more than a dozen health care plans — some involving the subsidies, others not — leaving members back in square one as they try to figure out what product can make its way to President Donald Trump’s desk. […]
The Trump administration plans to break up Colorado’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, the largest federal climate research lab. Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, announced the plan Tuesday in a statement on X.
Rather than believing whatever Tucker Carlson says, let’s wait and see.
Right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson appeared on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom” podcast Wednesday, where he claimed that a member of Congress told him that President Donald Trump plans to announce war on Venezuela during his national address Wednesday night.
After months of ethically unscrupulous, morally abhorrent, and legally dubious bombings of Venezuelan boats, Trump has escalated pressure on the country through a series of economic embargoes that many view as acts of war. [video]
Carlson: So my sense is, I don’t know the answer. I’ve certainly been on the phone a lot about it. I have no power. I’m a podcaster, but I’m very interested. And so here’s what I know so far, which is that members of Congress were briefed yesterday that a war is coming, and it’ll be announced in the address to the nation tonight at 9 o’clock by the president. Who knows, by the way, if that will actually happen? I don’t know, and I never want to overstate what I know, which is pretty limited in general, but a member of Congress told me that this morning.
birgerjohanssonsays
Discovery Future
“New Evidence Shows Vikings Were in America Much Longer Than We Thought”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=- mG2ciX8UlY
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Follow-up to Lynna@7.
four House Republicans broke from GOP leaders and signed a discharge petition to force a vote on a Democratic proposal to extend the subsidies for three years. Those four signatures were enough to clinch the 218 mark required to force the vote.
Earlier, the House voted 204-203 in a procedural move to stop the last-minute attempt by Democrats, aided by four Republicans, to force quick votes on a three-year extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidy. Democrats loudly protested, accusing Republican leadership of gaveling an end to the vote prematurely while some members were still trying to vote.
[…]
Under the rules of the House, Democrats can insist on a vote on their three-year extension. But House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters late on Wednesday that he would not schedule that vote until the first week of January, when Congress returns from a recess that is set to begin by the end of this week.
The House floor is just exploding right now after Republicans—frantic they would lose a procedural hurdle that would force a vote on a Dem discharge petition—closed the vote early, […] Rs really are playing with the floor right now in ways that’s not usual. They’re nervous.
Trump delivered a live speech on TV, supposed to touts the trumpian economy.
Here are some excerpts from NBC’s coverage:
[…] Trump claimed that 25 million undocumented immigrants crossed into the United States under Biden.
“Our border was open, and because of this, our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people,” he said. “Many who came from prisons, jails, mental institutions and insane asylums.”
In reality, 7.4 million immigrants crossed the border illegally under Biden, according to CBP statistics. If you include those who crossed the border at legal points of entry but without documentation, the number is 10.2 million.
Roughly 800,000 immigrants came in through legal programs set up under Biden, such as the program for people coming from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Trump incorrectly said his “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed this year includes “no tax on Social Security.”
In fact, the provision he’s referring to is a tax deduction for seniors; it has nothing to do with Social Security income, which will continue to be taxed as it has been. The IRS website provides more details.
[…] Trump again criticized Minnesota’s Somali community.
“Since I took office, 100% of all net job creation has gone to American-born citizens, 100%. In the end, government either serves the productive patriotic, hardworking American citizen, or it serves those who break the laws, cheat the system and seek power and profit at the expense of our nation,” he said.
“Look at Minnesota,” he continued, “where Somalians have taken over the economics of the state and have stolen billions and billions of dollars from Minnesota and indeed from the United States of America. And we’re going to put an end to it.”
Trump has criticized Somalis often in recent weeks. He said this month that Minnesota was “a hellhole right now. The Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain.
Trump spent much of his speech taking aim at some of his most frequent targets, including Biden, migrants and transgender people. [Same as it ever was. I snipped the details because we already know the kind of bullshit Trump spews on those subjects.]
“Already, I’ve secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States,” Trump said early in his speech. […]
A recent Bloomberg News fact-check found the real figure closer to $7 trillion. But there, too, many of the investments were vague pledges or part of framework trade deals that have not yet been signed. [!!] [Funny money, imaginary money that exists only in Trump’s mind.]
[…] Trump tonight announced a “warrior dividend” for members of the military.
“A warrior dividend in honor of our nation’s founding in 1776,” Trump said in his address to the nation. “We are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that, and the checks are already on the way.”
Trump said more than 1 million service members will receive the payment. […]
Trump attributed much of his administration’s perceived success this year to his tariff policies.
“Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs, my favorite word, tariffs, which for many decades have been used successfully by other countries against us, but not anymore,” Trump said. […]
Tariffs have started to have an impact on consumers, but not in the way Trump suggests. A report Goldman Sachs analysts published in October found that American consumers were taking on as much as 55% of their costs.
StevoRsays
Aussie PM Albo had a pressconference earlier today -saw parts of it whilst watching Adelaide Ashes cricket Test too – & has come up with, this -fromthe news articles summary bit at top :
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced sweeping reforms to clamp down on antisemitism in the wake of the deadly Bondi terror attack, while conceding his government is not perfect and could have done more before the tragedy.
As part of the response, the government will use tougher hate speech laws to target preachers who promote violence.
What’s next?
The prime minister said the government “adopts and fully supports” the antisemitism envoy’s recommendations and would continue to work through the implementation.
^Sobit of a worry that this willbe use dto silecne and furtehr harm the Palestinian and Muslim Australian communitie sand furtehr limit the rights to protest and free speeech here.
Clarity fix : ^So bit of a worry that this will be used to silence and further harm the Palestinian-Australian and Muslim Australian communities and further limit the rights to protest and free speeech here.
birgerjohanssonsays
Satellites That Scoop Air And Use It As Propellant
Not that new as “news” & forget if I’ve mentioned before but still :
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party has been listed as one of 20 established and emerging hate groups in Australia by a global extremism think tank, for its track record on anti-multiculturalism, white nationalism, and COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
In a report released on Wednesday, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) added One Nation and the Australian Christian Lobby to its registry of Australian hate groups, as part of an educational global series aimed at illustrating how local hate groups interact with others around the world.
Wendy Via, the report’s author and co-founder of GPAHE, said far-right extremist movements, like those listed in the report, inspire terrorism, mass killings, and rights-restricting policies around the world, and they’re increasingly interconnected.
RFK Jr. is paying hack antivaxx researchers to kill babies with placebo vaccines in a trial where they stupidly hope it’ll be the babies who get real vaccines that die.
RFK Jr. has awarded $1.6 million to a group in Denmark to conduct a randomized, single-blind study of the birth dose of Hepatitis B vaccine (HepB) to be conducted in Guinea-Bissau. In my opinion, this is, quite simply, completely unethical, unacceptable, and predatory.
[…]
Through decades of research, HepB vaccine at birth has already been demonstrated be safe and effective, and has in the U.S. reduced childhood HepB infection by 99% since it was implemented. It is unethical to administer a placebo to infants instead of a vaccine that is known to work. […] This is especially egregious in Guinea-Bissau, where adult prevalence of active HepB is 18.7% (In US it’s 4.3%).
Such a study would not pass any ethics board in the U.S., which is why, IMO, RFK Jr. is taking this offshore and preying on an extremely vulnerable population. He does not care how many people have to die in Guinea-Bissau, just like he did not care in Samoa and he does not care in the U.S.
A red flag for this study is that it is a single-blind study. This means that while parents of infants will not be informed if their baby is not protected against HepB, the researchers *will* know. And that knowledge results in bias, which is why double-blind trials are the gold standard.
Another red flag is this: […] RFK Jr. simply handed the money over to the Denmark team without legit review. […] To do it in Guinea Bissau is perfectly vile, and to farm it out to Denmark to avoid US ethics boards is disgraceful.
Journal Vaccine – What is actually the emerging evidence about non-specific vaccine effects in randomized trials from the Bandim Health Project? (paywalled) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264410X25012344
a series of Danish news articles scrutinized the research practices of Drs Benn and Aaby. As external experts in statistics and research methodology, we were asked to contribute independent assessments of their conclusions from their own randomized controlled trials. We were surprised to find several instances of questionable research practices, such as unpublished primary outcomes, outcome switching, reinterpretation of trials based on statistically fragile subgroup analyses, and frequent promotion of cherry-picked secondary findings as causal, even when primary outcomes yielded null results. Sample size calculations appeared to be driven by unwarranted optimism regarding effect-sizes and event rates leading to underpowered studies.
Elizabeth Jacobs: “Holy shit. I do not have confirmation that it’s Benn’s group but all signs point in that direction.”
Rando 1: “Given she has written specifically about ‘NSEs’ regarding children in precisely this country, I would be surprised if somehow there was a second vaccine-denying Dutch group interested in experimenting on children in Guinea-Bissau.”
Rando 2: “In Guinea-Bissau? The country has just had a coup d’etat. This is insane.”
Rando 3: “Stabell Benn and her husband Peter Aaby run the Bandim Health Project.”
The Bandim Health Project, which follows a population of more than 200,000 individuals in urban and rural Guinea-Bissau […] This research group has long contended that live (attenuated) vaccines have beneficial nonspecific effects (NSE) beyond the target disease(s) and that non-live vaccines have detrimental NSE, even lethal ones. Recent reporting contends that there is no robust evidence to support NSE, either beneficial or harmful, and that the Bandim Health Project has a long history of deceptive publishing. […] Gradually, I became appalled and then indignant as I dug deeper into literature. I discovered disturbing patterns of dubious methods and research standards.
I am not a researcher, and I am not an expert in vaccines. I am an MD, I hold a PhD in ophthalmology, and a diploma of journalism. I work in and teach research communication […] Quite frankly, it is a mystery to me how researchers in NSE have managed to analyze and communicate their results in ways that are incompatible with generally accepted scientific standards and practices. This has gone on for decades.
^ Rando 3: “The article is good. It just sucks that one of the two principals who run the site is an anti-vaccine nut (Mandrola) and the other, Cifu, who will mouth pro-vaccine stances, when asked, just enables it all.”
Rebecca Fielding-Miller (Epidemiologist): “This is just Tuskegee levels of malfeasance. Like the example you would put on a public health ethics 101 training and then scrap it because it’s too obvious.”
MarkH (Trauma surgeon): “Worse than Tuskegee because at least at the start of that trial there wasn’t already an effective therapy. Hits all the other marks though—single blind, on a vulnerable population, white investigators, black patients etc. Just a big ol racist boondoggle.”
Ferric Fang (Infectious disease spec): “My understanding is that when federal funds are used for a clinical trial conducted outside the US, researchers must comply with US human subjects protections, and the relevant IRB must obtain an assurance of compliance with ethical standards set by the US Office for Human Research Protections.”
Elizabeth Jacobs: “Normally that would be true. But RFK Jr. can do whatever he wants.”
Elizabeth Jacobs: “I would absolutely imagine [Denmark would be solid on medical ethics], which is why this is puzzling.”
Rando 4: “Awarding funds does not mean the study has received necessary ethical approvals. typically, preparing/submitting the IRB/PRA package is a funded task in the contract. I have had projects that failed to pass PRA clearance and the govt terminates the contract early and de-obligates remaining funds. So best case scenario RFK jr is wasting taxpayer $$ paying researchers to design a doomed study that will never make it out of ethics review.“
StevoRsays
Soem real Comet ATLAS the interstellar one news here via space dot com
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will make its closest approach to Earth this week on Dec. 19, 2025. Here’s the latest news you need to know.
Comet 3I/ATLAS will approach within 168 million miles (270 million kilometers) of Earth when it makes its close flyby on Dec. 19.
Astronomers are calling the comet flyby an early Christmas gift for scientists. Here’s why.
Hepatitis B infection has two phases—acute and chronic. The chronic phase lasts years and results in the progressive destruction of the liver. Progression to a chronic phase is inversely proportional to age. For infants, this can be as high as 95% of cases.
In places like Guinea-Bissau, where the prevalence of HepB is high, vertical transmission from parent to child is one of the main routes of transmission.
Denying anyone a treatment that is tremendously effective at preventing this is a moral crime.
Gavin Chait (Data scientist): “Oh, it’s against a lot of laws. Think laws arising out of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, codified in UN statute, and in EU and US law. I’m hoping someone sues the clinical research team before this gets started.”
Rando 2: “As he cut every single medical research grant in the United States.”
Rando 3: “We can’t work with foreign collaborators, but they can send money to a foreign PI to conduct an ethically questionable study in a vulnerable population in another foreign country? This is what corruption looks like.”
Britain;
“MORE NIGEL FARAGE SCANDAL As (Supposedly) Nigel Broke Electoral Law During Clacton Campaign”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=NUd7AJmmArQ
The bloke who sang Hitler Youth songs in school and joined a far-right group as a young man is facing even more questions.
Truth Social parent company Trump Media & Technology Group announced a deal on Thursday to merge with nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies.
The surprise merger drove shares of Trump Media (DJT) 35% higher in early trading Thursday.
The companies said the all-stock transaction is valued at more than $6 billion and will create one of the first publicly traded fusion companies.
Trump Media is not a winning business on it’s own, what little value it has mostly comes from all the people that want to keep an eye on Trump’s feed. It’s diversifying by investing in a random slew of fields that happen to be hot and filled with lots of bad transactions such as crypto and AI. I expect TAE is hoping to bypass inspections, legal requirements and pesky details like environmental regulation by hooking up with Trump directly.
“That the president felt compelled to lie incessantly through his speech says volumes about how awful the year has been.”
Related video at the link.
The idea behind a year-end presidential address isn’t necessarily unreasonable. In late December, it stands to reason that White House officials would take a moment to pause and reflect and to take stock of the year that was, to give the public an assessment of their performance.
That is, in theory.
In practice, Donald Trump’s year-end prime-time address presented the American public with 18 minutes of combative presidential blame-shifting and excuse-making, packaged in the unsubtle desperation of a man who doesn’t seem to understand why so much of the public doesn’t appreciate his systemic failures and embarrassments. [True. Trump does not understand.]
But above all, the Republican president did what he always does: He lied uncontrollably. In fact, his speech was so littered with brazen falsehoods that it was rather easy to come up with a top 10 list.
#10: “Already, I’ve secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States.” It’d be great if that were true, but it’s not. [Embedded links for sources are available at the main link.]
#9: “Our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people.” That total wasn’t even close to being true.
#8: “I was elected in a landslide.” No, he wasn’t.
#7: “The price of a Thanksgiving turkey was down 33% compared to the Biden last year.” Is he still peddling this nonsense? Evidently, yes, though it’s still not true.
#6: Trump said the Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed this year included, among other things, “no tax on Social Security.” That might sound nice, but that wasn’t actually a part of the far-right package.
#5: “When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.” Trump says this all the time, but it’s demonstrably false.
#4: “I’ve … settled eight wars in 10 months.” I get the sense that he’s convinced himself that this happened, but it hasn’t, no matter how many times he repeats the line.
#3: “Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon into much of the country. In some states, it, by the way, just hit $1.99 a gallon.” This is a weird thing to lie about, since consumers know better, but for the record, this obviously wasn’t true.
#2: “The price of eggs is down 82% since March, and everything else is falling rapidly.” The president would very likely be more popular if this were true, but it’s not.
#1: “I negotiated directly with the drug companies and foreign nations, which were taking advantage of our country for many decades, to slash prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400%, 500% and even 600%.” This whopper claimed the top spot for me, because on top of the absurdity of the lie, one has to layer the fact this guy still doesn’t understand how numbers work.
I could keep going. In the same speech, for example, Trump said he’d restored international respect for the United States, which is the opposite of what actually happened. Before that, the incumbent president insisted that during Joe Biden’s presidency, there was “crime at record levels, with law enforcement and words such as that just absolutely forbidden.” Both of these two claims were outrageously wrong.
Indeed, I’m honestly not sure which is the greater challenge: chronicling all of Trump’s lies from his end-of-year speech or trying to find a claim in the remarks that was true.
Either way, that the president found it necessary to lie incessantly throughout his year-end address speaks volumes about just how awful the first year of his second term has been.
KGsays
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will make its closest approach to Earth this week on Dec. 19, 2025. space.com quoted by StevoR@22
Clearly, the aliens sent it because they want to see the Epstein files!
The “Presidential Walk of Fame” was already a tacky mess, and one report suggests it’s now “even more stunningly stupid.”
When it comes to altering the White House, it’s been a busy year for Donald Trump. The incumbent president decided, for example, to pave the Rose Garden. He has taken a borderline unhealthy interest in interior decorating, including bringing in his “gold guy” to add gold finishes to just about everything in the Oval Office.
Trump also installed a flagpole that he seemed awfully excited about, he boasted about “ripping” apart the tile in the bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom, he installed a mirror and bronze lettering at the entrance to the West Wing, and he turned the Oval Office study into a depot for “TRUMP 2028” merch, as if it were a cheap gift shop at a Trump-owned property.
Then his ambitions took a more destructive turn: The president tore down the entirety of the East Wing, despite having promised not to do so, to make room for a vanity project, a giant ballroom.
But to fully appreciate just how ridiculous the overhaul has become, consider what Trump has done to the colonnade at the White House exterior on the south side of the mansion.
In September,Trump installed what was billed as a “Presidential Walk of Fame,” featuring images of American presidents. Predictably, the gaudy display was turned into an exercise in juvenile political trolling: Where there was supposed to be an image of Joe Biden, there’s a framed photograph of an autopen.
This week it got worse. NBC News reported:
The White House has installed plaques on the exterior of the building bashing President Donald Trump’s predecessors, including Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and promoting disinformation about their administrations.
The plaques were hung up below presidential portraits that have been on display on Trump’s recently added ‘Presidential Walk of Fame’ in the White House colonnade.
A related Washington Post report noted that the plaques “have all the feel of an official marker placed at a historical site, with bronze-hued trim and gold-lettered type.” But the words on the plaques “are written in the style of a Truth Social post.”
That’s not a compliment. The displays smear assorted Democrats in ways that are cheap and dishonest, while praising others based on their associations with the incumbent. (The one for Ronald Reagan reads in part, “He was a fan of President Donald J. Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House.”)
While this display was already a tacky embarrassment, a New York magazine report made the case that it’s now “even more stunningly stupid.”
The conversation about Trump’s White House renovations is important, but it’s worth expanding the conversation to include what can be described as Trump’s White House vandalism.
To add insult to injury, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News in a statement that Trump wrote the text of “many” of the plaques.
“The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each president and the legacy they left behind,” she said. “As a student of history, many were written directly by the president himself.”
For now, let’s not get sidetracked by a debate about their eloquence. Let’s also skip past Leavitt’s dangling participle and the hilarious suggestion that Trump is “a student of history.”
Let’s note that the sitting American president, at a time when he ought to be quite busy with weighty responsibilities of international import, is investing time and energy into writing trolling messages for fake plaques.
This White House is obsessed with trivialities and distractions. By all appearances, the fixation is getting worse.
The Trump White House isn’t really doing much to disguise at least one of its motivations for moving to dismantle a critical scientific research center in Boulder: It wants to free Big Lie supporter Tina Peters from prison in Colorado. [Surprise!]
Colorado officials have refused to play along with President Trump’s purported pardon of Peters for her state conviction for tampering with election machines. While a presidential pardon for state crimes isn’t a real thing, the White House wants you to know that Colorado is paying a price for that perceived defiance: “Maybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, his constituents would be better served,” a senior White House official told NOTUS.
If that doesn’t seem like a direct link to the Peters pardon, trust me. It’s the response the White House gave to multiple other outlets, including the NYT and WaPo, who linked Colorado’s rejection of the Peters pardon with the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
It doesn’t have to be either/or. OMB Director Russ Vought may simply have seized on the Peters pardon as something near and dear to Trump’s heart and used it to justify disruption and chaos that he wanted to sow anyway. [True]
[…] All of this is prompting a truly desperate response from scientific circles:
– WaPo: “The announcement drew outrage and concern from scientists and local lawmakers, who said it could imperil the country’s weather and climate forecasting, and appeared to take officials and employees by surprise.”
– Meteorologist Matt Lanza: “I cannot begin to tell you what a bad, bad, bad decision this is. Objectively so. This will absolutely cripple and devastate weather research in the U.S.” [!]
– NYT: “The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.”
The U.S. conducted its 26th lawless boat strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, killing four people and bringing the total death total in the high seas campaign to at least 99.
The U.S. military was blindsided by President Trump’s announcement of a blockade of Venezuela, the NYT reports
Mr. Trump’s announcement of a “blockade” caught senior officials at the Pentagon and at Southern Command in Florida by surprise. On Wednesday, they scrambled to figure out the U.S. military’s role in the action, U.S. officials said.
The Trump administration is planning to dramatically ramp up efforts to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidance obtained by the NYT. The plan calls for a massive increase in the number of such cases each month, straining government capacity and heightening the risk of due process violations:
The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year. If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department.
It’s not at all clear that the plan is feasible, but that may not really be the point.
“The Vanity Fair photographer who disrupted Trumpworld’s polished image”
“Every line, spot, blemish and blood vessel was captured by Christopher Anderson’s lens.”
On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published a two-part story by Chris Whipple about the inner circle of President Donald Trump’s staff featuring unusually candid conversations with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. It also featured remarkably unvarnished portraits of Wiles, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Karoline Leavitt, all photographed by Christopher Anderson.
[…] The images are really arresting. What is your response to people who say that these images are unfair? There’s been a lot of attention about Karoline Leavitt’s lips and [what appear to be] injection sites.
“I didn’t put the injection sites on her. People seem to be shocked that I didn’t use Photoshop to retouch out blemishes and her injection marks. I find it shocking that someone would expect me to retouch out those things.” […]
More at the links, including the startling closeups. The most revealing photos can be viewed at the Washington Post link.
In his speech, Trump praised his tariff policy […]
But within hours of the speech’s conclusion, Trump’s message was undermined. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its regular Consumer Price Index report on Thursday morning. The report shows that food prices in November increased 2.6% year over year—higher than in November 2024, when the pace of food inflation was 2.4%.
The BLS report details that prices for meat, poultry, fish and eggs increased even more, by 4.7% over the past year.
In 2024, Trump campaigned against high food prices under the Biden administration, and claimed he would push policies lowering costs on his first day in office. That has not happened.
In reality, Trump has increased tariffs on goods, and retailers are passing those increased costs on to consumers. Families are able to afford fewer things, and the change in spending habits is working its way through the economy.
And while the BLS report also reveals that core inflation—which excludes food and energy prices—eased slightly in November, many economists are warning that the data is troubled. For example, the report was delayed due to the Republican Party’s government shutdown, and much of the data gathering took place shortly before Black Friday, when prices were artificially lower, rather than across the entire month of November, as typically occurs.
Before the report’s release, former Federal Reserve economist Alan Detmeister said the overall report would be a “very poor reflection of reality.”
And other data agrees with that point. A Bureau of Labor Statistics report on Tuesday showed the unemployment rate is up to 4.6%, the highest it has been since September 2021, when the nation was still facing the COVID-19 pandemic. Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, said the unemployment data revealed that the U.S. was “in a hiring recession”—the opposite of the “hot” state Trump touted in his abrasive speech.
Trump’s speech also adds to swirling questions about his mental state.
When he wasn’t misconstruing Americans’ economic struggles, Trump used his bigoted anti-immigration actions to claim he was taking action to help American workers, arguing that deporting immigrants would mean “more housing and more jobs.”
In a cynical attempt to shore up his sagging approval ratings, Trump also announced a “warrior dividend” for military members, sending them $1,776 before Christmas, but this was actually a congressionally approved subsidy that was previously appropriated. [!]
Democratic leaders panned Trump’s shouting.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told MS NOW, “It was an unhinged speech that was, of course, untethered from reality and truth. You know, Donald Trump has made things worse for the American people.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, “President Trump’s speech last night showed he lives in a bubble completely disconnected from the reality everyday Americans are seeing and feeling.”
“Behind the absolutely unhinged delivery there is a simple truth: Trump’s corruption is helping his friends and family while things are getting worse for you and yours,” Democratic Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey wrote in a post on social media. “He’s failing you because he doesn’t care about you.”
Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner said the speech was a “sad attempt at distraction,” adding, “Americans know the truth: costs are up, unemployment is up, and he STILL won’t release the Epstein Files.”
Trump’s speech was out of touch with growing concerns about affordability, something Trump has called a “hoax” even as polls show the economy and inflation are their top issues.
Meanwhile, day after day, congressional Republicans are choosing not to run for reelection. It is a sign that Trump’s economy is a political loser—and more yelling isn’t going to help.
The news came during the president’s national address […] The payments come in the form of a one-time basic allowance for housing (BAH) supplement. Military housing allowances, especially BAH, are nontaxable because they cover living expenses.
Eligible service members who do not otherwise receive BAH will still receive the checks
[…]
Trump’s sweeping tax and spending law […] appropriated $2.9 billion to the Pentagon to supplement the BAH entitlement. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth directed his department to disburse $2.6 billion total as part of the “warrior dividend,” […] The remaining $300 million will support future BAH requirements […] The president, in his speech Wednesday night, suggested revenue generated from his tariffs are also to thank
Commentary
Taking money from married soldiers and their families, who mostly can not afford the cost of living already, and spreading it thinly across all service members
The super transparent and ethical Trump administration strikes again.
The Department of Homeland Security just slid an almost $1 billion contract to Salus Worldwide Solutions, a company run by William Walters. That staggering sum is for “Project Homecoming,” the gross DHS program that ostensibly provides cash bonuses, free flights, and a “concierge service” at airports for immigrants who self-deport.
Salus has never had a federal contract before, but surely it’s incredibly qualified and equipped to manage nearly a billion dollars, right?
We’re only learning about this sleazy deal because of a lawsuit filed by CSI Aviation, which details all of the backroom shadiness that went into making sure that Walters made bank.
Walters, unsurprisingly, began greasing the wheels to make this happen even before President Donald Trump won the 2024 election. He took a belt-and-suspenders approach, giving $10,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC run by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s pals, and he also gave big bucks to the America First Policy Institute.
AFPI was basically MAGA in exile until Trump returned to power. Founded by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, AFPI has managed to stuff dozens of people into the administration, including Rob Law, a DHS undersecretary of policy.
According to the lawsuit, Law helped coordinate the competition for this giant trough of money, but the competition was basically fake as hell. CSI Aviation alleges that, first, DHS shared information with Salus to help with its bid, which triggered an investigation by DHS lawyers.
After the investigation found that Salus had essentially helped design the contract it was going to bid on, DHS decided to fix this by opening the contract up to a competitive bid. It then picked six other companies, which received the documentation necessary to bid on the contract on Friday, May 16, with a deadline of 10 AM the following Monday.
Needless to say, a weekend was not enough time to develop an actual bid for a contract this large. And by then, Salus already had the benefit of months of discussions with DHS. So surprise, surprise: Salus won.
Has Salus ever handled anything like this? Of course not. But now it has nearly a billion dollars to run a complex program that does not seem to be working very well. In October, ProPublica found that people who signed up to self-deport ended up waiting in vain for plane tickets and money that never arrived, leaving them stranded and terrified.
Of the roughly 25,000 immigrants who opted to leave, nearly half did so on their own rather than going through the administration’s “concierge service.” But giving an inexperienced company almost a billion bucks will definitely fix this.
Walters was already swimming in DHS cash, having received $140 million just a few weeks ago to purchase six Boeing 737 airplanes for deportations. But he got that deal through a different company of his, Daedalus Aviation. A real jack of all trades, this guy.
And speaking of planes, who can forget that Noem also just got a couple of sweet new jets of her own for $172 million? She told Congress that she needed $50 million for one plane, and it isn’t at all clear to anyone how she then managed to get two planes for more than triple the cost.
Noem also steered $220 million to some longtime buddies in the political advertising world, but that netted U.S. taxpayers some pretty pictures of Cosplay Barbie on a horsey, so it was definitely worth it.
DHS essentially has infinite money at this point. As the Brennan Center put it, the $170 billion allotted for border enforcement in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” created a “deportation-industrial complex.”
Yes, all of this is designed to torment immigrants and drive them out of the country. But it’s also designed to make the worst people very, very rich—and DHS is all in.
[…] Massive banners have popped up across Washington displaying Trump’s huge face on the facade of federal buildings. According to findings by Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, the Trump administration used more than $50,000 in taxpayer money to foot the bill for this egotistical, autocratic display. […]
[…] there’s a whole lot about [Trump’s speech] last night that screams “keeping the patient comfortable,” and really, that’s the emerging story of his entire second failed presidency.
They’re putting up comforting, garish gold lettering to label rooms for [Trump], so he knows where he is, and they are repaving the Rose Garden to make him feel like he’s on his own patio at Mar-a-Lago […] They’re letting him bulldoze entire sections of the building so he can have a comforting ballroom. […]
And then news broke yesterday that, in what they’re calling Trump’s Presidential Walk of Fame, they’ve put up new plaques underneath all the different presidential portraits, to better reflect [Trump] and his various sad loser grievances. [alarming photo]
It’s of course horribly offensive. If you look at the picture above you can see that of course they’re putting up garish cheap Home Depot shit atop each portrait, haphazardly and far too much. You can tell he’s designing this himself, because […] it’s just cheap, tacky gold shit smeared everywhere […]
But before you get all offended by what the plaques say — don’t worry, you’ll have that chance in a second — please understand that this story is of the same genre as the other stories about turning the White House into a facility where Trump can hospice in place while his brain fully completes its conversion into expired pudding.
How do we know? Because of this dispatch from Mark Guiducci, the Vanity Fair global editorial director, commenting on the Susie Wiles story and photoshoot, and Christopher Anderson, the Vanity Fair photographer who did that Susie Wiles shoot, this little tidbit was also in the news yesterday: [social media post, with photos]
Go ahead, embiggen that second shot.
“Wiles’s executive assistant informed us that we would not be allowed to photograph either the ‘Presidential Walk of Fame’ or the Rose Garden, as we’d asked. ‘Those are very special to the president,’ she said. ‘They’re his spaces.’ Actually, I wanted to remind her, they’re not.”
Point to Guiducci, but that tells the real story of this so-called Presidential Walk of Fame. It’s one of the spaces in the White House that’s meant to make Trump feel comfortable […] It helps distract him, calms him, helps him nurse his grievances, helps him understand where he is.
[…] Speaking of Leavitt […]
“The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement describing the installation in the colonnade that runs from the West Wing to the residence. “As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.”
You know how you can tell he wrote them himself? Because they feature the third-grade reading level and dementia-fied grammar and capitalizations so common in his tweets.
[…] But anyway, about those eloquently written descriptions, for example Joe Biden! Haw haw haw! It doesn’t have a picture of Joe Biden, just his autopen! Look at everything Biden’s plaque says!
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. His policies caused the highest Inflation ever recorded, leading the U.S. Dollar to lose more than 20% of its value in 4 years. His Green New-Scam surrendered American Energy Dominance and, by abolishing the Southern Border, Biden let 21 million people from all over the World pour into the United States, including from prisons, jails, mental institutions, and insane asylums. His Afghanistan Disaster was among the most humiliating events in American History, and resulted in the murder of 13 brave American Servicemembers, with many others gravely wounded. Seeing Biden’s devastating weakness, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Hamas terrorists launched the heinous October 7th attack on Israel.
Nicknamed both “Sleepy” and “Crooked,” Joe Biden was dominated by his Radical Left handlers. They and their allies in the Fake News Media attempted to cover up his severe mental decline, and his unprecedented use of the Autopen. Following his humiliating debate loss to President Trump in the big June 2024 debate, he was forced to withdraw from his campaign for re-election in disgrace. Biden weaponized Law Enforcement against his political opponent, while also persecuting many other innocent people. He left office issuing blanket pardons to Radical Democrat criminals and thugs, as well as members of the Biden Crime Family-But despite it all, President Trump would get Re-Elected in a Landslide, and SAVE AMERICA!
[JFC!]
Again, understand that these plaques are there to comfort Donald Trump as he appears to be suffering from absolutely crippling dementia. Also, note that they feature particular and peculiar delusions specific to Donald […] like his 1980s Batman movie belief that countries are emptying their “insane asylums” and sending those people here, because he doesn’t know what “asylum” means.
Similarly, the Obama one says, “Barack Hussein Obama was the first Black President, a community organizer, one term Senator from Illinois, and one of the most divisive political figures in American History. As President, he passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act, resulting in his party losing control of both Houses of Congress, and the Election of the largest House Republican majority since 1946.”
Also, “Under Obama, the ISIS Caliphate spread across the Middle East[.]”
Also, “Obama also spied on the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Donald J. Trump, and presided over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, the worst political scandal in American History.” [JFC!]
[…] You can see some pictures here: [social media post, with photos]
The AP notes that “the introductory plaque presumes Trump’s addition will be a White House fixture once he is no longer president,” which is very funny because it does indeed presume that! Shhhhh, nobody tell Trump they’re going to rip all the gold shit down […]
But we do hope they leave these plaques up after they bury Trump on the golf course next to Ivana, or at least transport them over to Walter Reed, so that future neurologists can study Donald Trump’s big, beautiful brain.
Trump on Venezuela: “Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had — they took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn’t watching. But they’re not gonna do that. We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. They threw our companies out. And we want it back.”
Here is my recap of Trump district court nominee Justin Olson’s Senate confirmation hearing, during which Olson spent a lot more time than I’d hoped sharing his thoughts on biblical eunuchs, the evils of fornication, and whether it’s appropriate for disabled people to get married.
[Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA)] asked Justin Olson if he said God “has called wives to be subject to their husbands” & “serve the good of your husband & support his calling.”
Said he was quoting a passage & they weren’t his words. Kennedy: “You said them. Do you believe them?”
Olson: “I believe every word of the Bible.” [Video clip]
Kennedy grilled an Indiana judicial nom on religious sermons he’s given on sexuality and marriage roles and he just told me he wants to have another meet to clarify some of his statement as this is a lifetime appointment.
“[…] if you suggest that someone who is developmentally impaired, mentally or physically, doesn’t have the right to marriage, that’s a bold statement.” […] it’s a “bold statement” to say that in a marriage “one partner is inferior to another.” […] When asked if he was not satisfied with the answers at the hearing, Kennedy said, “[…] I want him to explain this.”
From the recap: “In many ways, Olson is typical of the ambitious lawyers the Trump administration has been nominating […] Olson described himself as a ‘specialist’ in litigating a very particular type of Title IX case: those designed to bar transgender athletes from competing in college sports.”
Rando: “Genuine question: Is there any chance Kennedy votes against a Trump nominee? Is it even conceivable that he does anything other than harrumph, express concerns, and vote yes?”
“The board’s decision to add Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center could face legal hurdles, as the law creating the center prohibits renaming the building.”
The board of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., voted to rename it as the Trump-Kennedy Center, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X Thursday.
“I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” she wrote.
“Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur,” Leavitt added in her post.
[…] Efforts to rename the Kennedy Center could run into legal hurdles, experts told NBC News in July, after Republican lawmakers introduced several proposals in Congress to rename the center in honor of the president or the first lady.
The original laws that guided the creation of the Kennedy Center during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations specifically prohibited the renaming of the building. It would take an act of Congress to change that now.
After GOP Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho earlier this year first introduced the amendment to legislation that would rename the building after first lady Melania Trump, he said that she had not been aware of his efforts prior to his public introduction of the amendment. […]
“Mr. President, my faith is not a weapon, it’s a bridge, and I invite you to Bible study,” the Georgia Democrat replied.
On Sunday morning, Sen. Raphael Warnock appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” where host Kristen Welker gave the Georgia Democrat, who’s also the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, an opportunity to react to the deadly mass shooting at Brown University that had happened a day earlier.
“As I make my way to my own pulpit this morning, I’m going to say a special prayer for Brown University and for our nation,” Warnock said. “And I can tell you that as a pastor who has presided over many funerals, I don’t think that there’s any pain deeper than when nature is violently reversed and rather than children burying their parents, the parent has to bury the child. And so we pray prayers for these families.
“But we have to pray not only with our lips, but with our action. Any nation that tolerates this kind of violence year after year, decade after decade in random places, on our college and school campuses, without doing all that we can to stop it is broken and in need of moral repair.”
The senator went on to urge Americans to “dig deep” into their “common humanity” in the wake of the shootings at Brown campus and at Australia’s Bondi Beach.
Donald Trump apparently wasn’t impressed. Three days after the interview aired, the president published a message to his social media platform that began:
Raphael Warnock was on Meet the Fake Press with a one sided and very biased Kristen Welker as the Host(ess!). Warnock spent the entire show using Religion to try and divide the Country! If a Republican, in particular ME, made those statements, it would be FRONT PAGE NEWS. He ended by saying that he was going to his Church to preach now, and while I think that’s fine, I do say, ‘What ever happened to separation of Church and State?’
As part of the same online harangue, Trump went on to smear the senator and attack NBC, before concluding, “The Public airwaves, which these Networks are using at no charge, should not be allowed to get away with this any longer!”
For now, let’s put aside the obvious fact that Warnock’s on-air message wasn’t the least bit divisive. What instead stuck me as notable is that the incumbent president, after nearly five years in the White House, still doesn’t appear to understand the basics of the constitutional principle of church-state separation.
To hear Trump tell it, the fact that Warnock is both a pastor and a senator, who still delivers regular sermons, is some kind of violation of the First Amendment.
That’s ridiculous. The whole point of the separation of church and state is government neutrality on matters of faith, leaving Americans to make up their own minds and pursue their own spiritual or secular paths.
If Warnock wanted public funds or other governmental benefits for Ebenezer Baptist, that would be a problem. If he tried to use his office to force people into the pews, that obviously would be at odds with the law. If the senator was advocating on behalf of state-sponsored 10 Commandments into public classrooms, we’d be having a qualitatively different kind of conversation.
But if a senator, in his own time, chooses to speak to a congregation, that’s free speech.
This really isn’t that complicated.
If, however, Trump is looking for actual examples of officials crossing the church-state line that he’s suddenly taken an interest in, I’d refer him to the recent Christian prayer services sponsored by the Department of Labor, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Defense Department, each of which reflected an unsettling break with government neutrality on matters of faith. [!]
As for Warnock, the Georgia Democrat apparently saw Trump’s online rant and took the time to respond.
“He’s got a lot of nerve,” the senator said in a statement. “Remember, this is the same president who literally had peaceful protesters gassed and beaten so he could stand in front of a church holding a Bible up. He ought to read that Bible that he was holding up on that day. That Bible says that Jesus came to preach good news to the poor. He came to heal the sick. He never billed them for his services. He stood up for the weak, the marginalized, average, ordinary people.”
Warnock concluded, “Mr. President, my faith is not a weapon, it’s a bridge, and I invite you to Bible study. Maybe you can meet the Jesus I know. In the meantime, I’m going to keep fighting for the people.”
Seven hours into a make-or-break summit in Brussels, national leaders and senior EU officials remained locked in a series of intense separate talks as they tried to resolve their differences over how to fund Ukraine.
With EU governments talking up the risk of failure to get agreement to underwrite a €210 billion loan for Kyiv, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen insisted she would “not leave the summit without a solution.”
hat looks easier said than done. Agreeing on how to pay for the loan has been a nut that’s proved nearly impossible to crack in the run-up to the summit despite ― or perhaps because of ― almost non-stop diplomatic back-channelling since leaders failed at the first attempt at a summit two months ago.
By 6 p.m. on Thursday, some officials talked cautiously of progress. Two senior EU officials with knowledge of the deliberations told POLITICO they were now slightly more optimistic that the contours of a deal could be worked out on Thursday night ― or at least in the early hours of Friday. Others continued to play down any such breakthrough.
Leaders ripped up their plans almost immediately on Thursday morning. They decided to discuss minor items on their agenda ― including EU enlargement and the bloc’s next seven-year budget ― to allow their aides to get down to business on Ukraine throughout the day.
[…] trusted aides held discussions in small groups behind closed doors while separately technical-level envoys were tasked with redrafting the proposals.
While that was going on, the prime ministers and presidents left the main summit table to drop in and out of these smaller huddles. They took an unscheduled break after lunch to check in on progress with their teams.
For weeks, politicians have been unable to agree on which version of a financing plan they want. Belgium, in particular, has been opposed to the main plan of using Russian assets frozen in Europe. It hosts the bulk of the funds and fears it is especially exposed to legal action or reprisals from Moscow.
Despite weeks of painstaking negotiations over the assets, efforts to bring Belgium around appeared to be backfiring this week, according to officials. The country adamantly opposes using the Russian money held by Euroclear in Brussels, and has now attracted allies, including Italy, the bloc’s third-largest country.
At the summit, the Belgian delegation presented a two-page paper listing its conditions, one EU diplomat said. That latest document — which is longer than previous iterations — includes demands for “blank check” protection in case the Kremlin sues Belgium over deploying the billions of euros of frozen Russian assets held in Brussels, the diplomat said. Other EU countries have long resisted that demand.
The so-called frugal countries reject any alternative plan to the assets, such as raising a joint loan between all EU countries. That idea has for years been anathema to the northern member countries, who have been unwilling to underwrite bonds for highly indebted southern countries. Germany and its allies warn there is still no alternative to targeting the Euroclear money.
A deal is urgent because without it, Ukraine will run out of money in April and will be forced to cut spending, four years into its war with Russia.
“The decision must be made by the end of this year,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters at the summit, adding that his country would have to begin reducing the number of drones it produces if the EU money fails to materialize. […]
Former special counsel Jack Smith told a congressional committee Wednesday that his team found ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt’ that President Donald Trump engaged in a ‘criminal scheme’ to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to parts of his opening statement obtained by NBC News.
Trump also ‘repeatedly tried to obstruct justice’ to keep secret his retention of classified documents found during an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Smith told members of the House Judiciary Committee at a closed-door hearing.
Commentary:
[… Smith added that he and his team turned up “powerful evidence that showed Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in Jan. 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.” […]
Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, commenting on a House vote on a bill extending enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years:
Fitzpatrick: I can tell you, my colleagues from very, very conservative districts have quietly been coming up to me on the floor saying, “Thank you for what you’re doing. We want leadership to head in this direction.”
They feel politically they can’t do it, for whatever reason, but they’re supportive—people that you would be shocked [by]. Because anybody that represents, you know, some of these lower- to middle-income earners that fall between, you know, traditional Medicaid, Medicaid expansion, and private insurance—that’s the bucket of people we’re talking about now.
And by the way, if you don’t live in a Medicaid expansion state, it’s an even larger pool of people, but these are good people that want to make the right decision, want to buy health insurance, but are getting squeezed. And they need us to help them.
[…] Trump’s “warrior dividends” of $1,776 will use funding appropriated for military housing subsidies under the administration’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The money for the one-time checks intended for U.S. service members, which the president announced during his Wednesday night national address, will come from the $2.9 billion Congress approved this summer to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) entitlement, according to a senior administration official.
[snipped Trump’s blather]
The Department of Defense (DOD) will use about $2.6 billion of the allocated funds for the checks to eligible service members, a Pentagon official said on Thursday.
The payments will be made by Saturday, and the remaining $300 million will be used by the DOD to support “future BAH requirements,” the official said.
The “warrior dividends” will be dispatched to about 1.454 million service members, including around 1.28 million Active Component military members and 174,000 reservists.
The government’s plan to use housing funds to pay out the checks was first reported by Defense One.
[…] The use of housing funds to pay out the “warrior dividends” has produced mixed reactions on Capitol Hill.
“Your $1,776 ‘warrior checks’ aren’t Christmas bonuses—you’re just stealing money out of a fund meant to help our troops find affordable housing,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a former helicopter pilot who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Thursday on the social platform X. “Once a conman always a conman.” […]
Trump announces an “unprecedented four-day athletic event” with “one young man and one young woman from each state and territory”.
May the odds be ever in your favor. [Video clip]
Randos:
It’s not “unprecedented” if it’s the plot of The Hunger Games.
I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Was *sure* this was AI-generated satire. But it’s not, it’s really not.
It’s gonna be a golf tournament and he’ll declare himself champion at the end
If this means we get a charismatic 16yo who unites the nation and becomes a critical figure in the rebellion that overturns tyranny, you know what, I’m ok with this.
I am definitely rooting for the contestants from Puerto Rico.
the first “Patriot Games,” Trump said, […] “featuring the greatest high school athletes[“] in the fall […] “But I promise there will be no men playing in women’s sports. You’re not gonna see that. You’ll see everything but that,” he quipped.
[…]
the UFC fight will be held on Flag Day, June 14.
“EXCLUSIVE: Stephen Miller’s hard-line Mexico strategy morphed into deadly boat strikes”
“The Trump administration originally planned to go after Mexican drug cartels, but pivoted to Venezuela, according to current and former officials. A trio of legal documents and directives have subsequently authorized an unorthodox lethal campaign.”
[…] Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, and other senior officials were looking for a fight.
In the first months of the administration, Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration and border policies, and his team discussed starting a new war on drugs by striking cartels and alleged traffickers in Mexico, according to one current and two former U.S. officials.
[…] But as the administration surged thousands of U.S. troops to the southern border, increased U.S. surveillance flights and boosted intelligence sharing with its neighbor, Mexican military operations across the border curbed cartel action, the people said. That left Miller and his team looking for another target.
“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” said the current official, who, like nine others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
The campaign that emerged in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean is unprecedented in its use of lethal force by the U.S. military against alleged drug smuggling groups. These operations, which began Sept. 2, have evolved to embrace the Trump team’s long-running ambition to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the president has accused of overseeing “narco-terrorists” assaulting the United States.
Miller has been a driving force behind the administration’s counternarcotics campaign, pressing for results and fresh military options that could be turned into future operations, the current and former officials said. [snipped some White House blather from spokeswoman Anna Kelly.]
[…] Miller steered the drafting of a July 25 classified directive signed by the president that authorized the military to undertake lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups, said a former U.S. official familiar with the campaign and its evolution. The administration has labeled these groups “designated terrorist organizations,” accusing them of using drugs as a weapon to kill Americans, using a moniker that many experts say has no basis in law.
[…] [A] presidential directive provided the foundational authority for an “execute order” that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued on Aug. 5 and that subsequently has been modified. The order, details of which were previously unreported, contains permissive targeting guidelines for lethal operations, current and former officials said. […]
Together, these two documents guided a military campaign of lethal strikes against criminal organizations, grafting a wartime frame to what has been traditionally treated as a law enforcement problem. The execute order also contains targeting criteria lifted from the language of the counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which some current and former officials say give the Pentagon an overly permissive license to kill.
The department will treat suspected drug smugglers “EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda. We will continue to track them, map them, hunt them, and kill them,” Hegseth said on social media last month.
Pursuant to these orders, the Trump administration has launched strikes on at least 26 boats, killing at least 99 people in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The Pentagon has not publicly identified those killed, and it is unclear whether it has collected the intelligence to do so.
“The administration appears to have authorized a campaign against civilians and alleged criminals that is now stretching the limits of international law so that it’s now totally unrecognizable,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign and is director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law. […]
As the summer progressed, the White House’s campaigns against narcotics and migration coalesced with a long-held desire of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to force Maduro from power. Rubio and the Justice Department in August doubled to $50 million the reward for information leading to the Venezuelan leader’s arrest, citing an indictment for corruption and drug trafficking during the first Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the White House found a willing partner in Hegseth, who had been knocked off stride by several missteps and was eager to show he could deliver on a high-priority mission.
“Pete very much wanted to keep Stephen in his good graces and also the president,” said the former official familiar with Miller’s thinking. “And that was a motivation for him — getting behind this campaign in an aggressive way.”
[…] Elements of Miller’s leading role were reported earlier by The Guardian.
[…] Initially, the order contained a geographic boundary that designated target areas in international waters off the coast of Venezuela, but it was modified about two months later to include the eastern Pacific area, one current and one former U.S. official said. It specified that at least for the initial strikes, Joint Special Operations Command would be in charge of operations, the two people said.
[…] lawyers and policy personnel raised concerns about the legality of the lethal force campaign that was taking shape. Administration officials sought to reassure them by saying that a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo was being drafted that determined that the lethal targeting of suspected drug runners was lawful under the president’s power to ascertain that the U.S. is in a formal state of war — in this case with alleged drug traffickers.
But the opinion was not signed until Sept. 5 — three days after the first boat strike — and some career lawyers were not permitted to read the draft OLC memo before the execute order was issued […]
The OLC memo, signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, asserts that alleged drug trafficking groups are a threat to the United States akin to a foreign nation attempting to invade, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), who was allowed to read it in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told The Post in an interview.
The execute order contains targeting instructions that do not require positive identification of any individual but rather “reasonable certainty” that adult males are members of, or affiliated with, a “designated terrorist organization,” or DTO, according to five current and former U.S. officials familiar with the criteria. To mitigate civilian harm, the order requires “near certainty” that no women, children or civilians are present, they said.
The administration is using the phrase “designated terrorist organizations” to refer to 24 alleged drug trafficking groups […]
The term, said Rebecca Ingber, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law and a former State Department law-of-war expert, “is entirely manufactured as a source of targeting authority with no basis in law.’’
[…] Trump has asserted, without offering proof, that the U.S. troops know who they are targeting in every case. “We know everything about them. We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live,” he told reporters this month.
[…] “I knew them all,” one of the family members told The Post in October, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “None of them had anything to do with Tren de Aragua. They were fishermen who were looking for a better life” by smuggling contraband. [“the boat was smuggling marijuana and cocaine”]
In some of the strikes, the targets who have been identified are not high-level operators or cartel bosses, lawmakers said. “It’s one thing to be a narco-terrorist and another thing to be a fisherman that’s getting paid a hundred bucks a couple times a year … to supplement his income” […]
Though the administration’s charges against Maduro have merit, its claims that Venezuela is sending massive amounts of drugs to America do not, analysts and officials have said. The main domestic drug scourge is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid produced in Mexico, not Venezuela.
Many strikes taken have been in the Pacific, the main sea lane used by traffickers from Colombia and Ecuador. Drug running in the Caribbean focuses mainly on non-U.S. markets, such as Europe. The lethal strike on Sept. 2, for instance, targeted a boat carrying cocaine ultimately bound for Suriname, officials have said.
That absence of information has prompted speculation that the larger buildup of U.S. forces in the region is a preparation for an attack on Venezuela. Miller has indicated to colleagues that a strong reaction from Caracas could provide the pretext to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States, the former official noted. [JFC]
[…] “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Trump’s chief of staff, Susan Wiles, told Vanity Fair in an article published this week. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
[…] On Wednesday, Miller amplified Trump’s post, commenting: “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.” [Yep, Miller and Trump are looking for excuses to target Venezuela.]
More at the link.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Lynna @52 quoting WaPo:
Miller has indicated to colleagues that a strong reaction from Caracas could provide the pretext to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States, the former official noted. [JFC]
He took the wrong lesson this spring from hearing “They’re not gang members, membership alone wouldn’t be a crime, gangs aren’t a country, and we’re not at war with Venezuela!”
“Tractors took over the streets of the European Quarter while EU leaders held a crunch summit.”
Farmers toppled the Christmas tree in front of the European Parliament and replaced it with a pyre of burning tires and debris, not far from where EU leaders were debating key issues for the bloc on Thursday.
While some of the tractors featured Christmas lights and cheerfully blasted video game theme songs and pop tunes through their horns, police struggled to contain rowdier outbursts at Place du Luxembourg. The European Quarter was thick with smoke as authorities resorted to tear gas to disperse demonstrators throughout the day. [video]
While only a portion of protesters turned violent, even peaceful participants had harsh words for EU leaders: “We take it for granted that food will be just produced. Farmers can’t continue to produce making a loss,” said Alice Doyle, a beef and tillage farmer from Wexford, Ireland.
The literal explosion of discontent is months in the making. In the summer, the European Commission presented its revamped agricultural budget, with a new structure and a lower guaranteed spend on farming. The Commission insists the new headline figure of almost €300 billion is a minimum spend, but farmers aren’t convinced. Farm lobbyists expected planters and ranchers from all 27 EU countries to gather in Brussels for the largest mobilization this century, coinciding with a high-stakes summit of the European Council.
In front of barriers protecting the European Parliament, piles of potatoes lay scattered after being thrown toward police officers, according to Belgian media. As Polish farmers threw deafening firecrackers at the European Parliament building, officials emailed staff advising them to stay away from windows while police were “managing the situation.”
The Commission’s push to ratify the Mercosur agreement, which beef and poultry farmers view as a threat to their businesses, added fuel to the fire as the end of the year approached. Combine that with long-standing complaints of Brussels bureaucracy, low incomes and national issues, and you get thousands of farmers on the European capitals’ streets.
“I’d like EU leaders to recognize agriculture as an essential value of Europe” said Máxime, a farmer wearing a T-shirt of the French farmers’ association FNSEA. As Place du Luxembourg filled with smoke, police blasted tear gas into the crowd before he could give his last name. […]
Investigators have identified a person of interest in the mass shooting at Brown University that killed two students and injured nine others, according to people familiar with the investigation who said they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
NBC News:
Police are looking into whether the fatal shooting this week of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, 47, in Brookline, Massachusetts, is linked to the mass shooting at Brown University on Saturday, four senior law enforcement officials tell NBC News.
U.S. inflation eased in November in what economists said likely reflected distortions caused by the government shutdown, creating an uncertain picture for the Federal Reserve as it simultaneously contends with rising unemployment.
The latest Consumer Price Index, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday, rose 2.7 percent from the same time last year.
A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked Department of Homeland Security guidance that placed new limits on members of Congress seeking to visit and inspect immigration detention facilities.
The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing this week that a decision to cut energy grants during the government shutdown was influenced by whether the money would go to a state that tended to vote for Democrats statewide or nationally.
“Bari Weiss Will Capitalize On First Loser Town Hall By Doing MORE Loser Town Halls!”
It turns out that Bari Weiss is bad at everything. Shockingly, being an uninteresting contrarian with no nose for news, zero discernible personality, […] don’t quite equip you to be the editor-in-chief of CBS News, the network that used to be home to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.
Oh, and she isn’t very good on TV, which sucks, since it turns out all she really wants is to be on TV.
The hilariously lousy ratings for her “town hall” with JonBenet Scamsey or the Widow of Chucky or whatever you want to call the equally un-compelling Er*ka K*rk have apparently convinced Weiss that when you’re running a network into the ground, the only proper course of action is to keep digging. So she’s going to do more “town halls,” with equally un-compelling guests, about subjects nobody who matters cares about. They are, on the other hand, the kinds of subjects hopelessly online weirdos like Bari Weiss care about. So look forward to more ratings bonanzas!
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is looking to make her mark on the network news division, launching a series of primetime town halls and debates alongside Weiss’ The Free Press under the banner “Things That Matter.”
CBS says that Vice President JD Vance, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have all agreed to participate in the town halls, with the debates set to address topics like “Does America Need God?” “Has Feminism Failed Women?” and “Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?”
CBS has lined up people like Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson to debate the American dream, Steven Pinker and Ross Douthat to debate the God question, and Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey to debate the feminism question.
Allie Beth Stuckey […] who thinks the problem with Christianity in America is that it’s too Christlike.
Ross Douthat. The one with the neckbeard […]
JD Vance, also with the neckbeard […]
“We believe that the vast majority of Americans crave honest conversation and civil, passionate debate,” said Weiss in a statement.
You can tell by how all the topics are framed in explicitly right-wing terms. […]
Yeah, Bari Weiss is a real fuckup.
Ever since that […] Ellison spawn who looks […] brought Weiss in to de-woke-ify CBS News, Weiss has been fucking it all up.
She announced the “town hall” with Grifterella [Erika Kirk], and immediately CBS News staffers started blabbing about it. “How embarrassing,” said one to the Independent. “Bari’s been Editor-in-Chief for five seconds and has revealed that all she really wants is to be on TV herself.” That person added:
“It doesn’t get more toe-curling than this,” the staffer said. “David Ellison must be mortified by his $150 million investment in someone who’s so quickly revealed themselves to be the most shallow, least interesting person in TV news.”
Then the incredibly boring event came and went — after CBS News had spent days obsessively flogging it, like it was the “get” of the century — and it turns out nobody watched. […]
It brought in a whopping 1.9 million viewers, and it really shit the bed among the 25-54 demo, AKA the demo advertisers care about. But hey, maybe more people will tune in to watch Allie Beth Stuckey whine about how “There are evil spiritual principalities at work” on Halloween, GAY demon principalities, or about how “most of our problems, a huge portion of problems in society are caused by premarital and extramarital sex.”
[…] Or maybe Bari Weiss’s judgment is for shit and she’s bad at everything.
Status reports (paywall) that she was planning on a triumphant internal town hall at CBS News after her thing with what’s-her-name [Erika Kirk], something about her big plans for the future of the news network she has failed upward to be in charge of. Now she is not having that town hall. But it’s not just that the ratings themselves sucked. […]
A New York Post report on the prime time special’s performance, headlined, “Bari Weiss’ town hall with Erika Kirk saw ratings plummet as CBS News editor-in-chief debuts on-screen,” particularly struck a nerve, I’m told. It also didn’t help that the network’s sub-2 million prime time audience came after the Army-Navy football game, which drew an average of 7.3 million viewers in the hours prior.
[That is spectacularly bad.]
[…] Sorry about all this, ghosts of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite! If it makes y’all feel any better, watching these people fail is very funny. […]
“The deal will lead to the U.S. version of TikTok being owned by a majority-American group of investors.”
TikTok CEO Shou Chew on Thursday told employees of the social media app that its owner, China’s ByteDance, has signed binding agreements to create a new joint venture for the app in the United States […]
That deal means that the U.S. version of TikTok will become majority-owned by American investors, according to a memo obtained by NBC News.
The investors include American tech giant Oracle, California-based private equity fund Silver Lake and UAE investment firm MGX.
[…] As part of the deal, TikTok U.S. will also be overseen by a “new seven-member majority-American board of directors,” Chew said.
“The U.S. joint venture will be responsible for U.S. data protection, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurance,” Chew writes in his memo. “It will also have the exclusive right and authority to provide assurances that content, software, and data for American users is secure.”
[…] Under a bipartisan law passed by Congress in 2024, ByteDance was required to divest majority ownership of the U.S. version of the app, or face a ban initially set to go into effect in January of this year.
The Trump administration repeatedly delayed the implementation of that law, however, until it cound hammer out the contours of an agreement with China. Trump ordered that “the Attorney General shall not take any action on behalf of the United States to enforce the Act for 120 days.”
That latest timeline ends on January 23. In the memo Thursday, TikTok’s CEO says the agreement will close one day before the deadline.
Oracle, one of the largest investors in the joint venture, is controlled by tech billionaire Larry Ellison. His son, David, recently acquired Paramount Global with approval from the Trump administration. David Ellison is now seeking to buy Warner Bros. Discovery via a hostile bid, for more than $108 billion.
Oracle has been a darling of the AI boom, ballooning Larry Ellison’s fortune to more than $230 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires.
The White House claims the vote to rename the Kennedy Center was “unanimous.” That is false. I was muted on the call and denied the opportunity to speak or register my opposition.
Apparently the only one because Trump has packed the board but it goes to show just how contemptibly cheap this White House is.
beholdersays
The Democratic National Committee won’t release a review of its election loss in 2024, saying it would be a “distraction” from helping the party win going forward.
I want to know what’s in that review!
Oh well. Glad to hear Democrat leadership has pre-emptively given up on winning the 2028 elections, and have instead opted for the strategy of stuffing StevoR-brand ear plugs in their heads and screaming: “La la la la la la!”.
the person of interest in the Brown University shooting has been found dead. [A 48yo] Portuguese national and former student at the school. […] Authorities said they believe the shooter acted alone, but his motive is not yet known. They said it is believed that the shooter and MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro, who was shot to death on Monday, attended university together in Portugal. […] “In terms of why Brown, that is a mystery,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said.
Among the live updates below the article:
Officials released a photo of person they wanted to talk to […] that person came forward […] “That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of that individual renting the car, which matched the clothing of our shooter here in Providence, that matched the satchel,”
a rental vehicle seen at Brown University around the time of Saturday’s shooting was also near the Brookline home of the slain MIT professor.
Militant Agnosticsays
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) will set up the conditions that resulted in the fatal collision between an airliner and a Blackhawk helicopter at the Ronald Reagan Airport earlier this year at any airport. The military will bale to conduct training exercises in crowded commercial airspace.
Captain Steeeve says this is “the fox guarding the henhouse”. Head of National Transportation Safety Board Jennifer Homendy is “hopping mad” about this idiocy – I think Captain Steeeve is too.
The US military is greater threat to aviation safety than any terrorist organization. The only thing these idiots learn from their mistakes is how to repeat them.
KGsays
Glad to hear Democrat leadership has pre-emptively given up on winning the 2028 elections – beholder@65
They obviously haven’t, but of course you’re pleased that you think they have – that’s absolutely no surprise to anyone here.
The Democratic party not making an evaluation of what went wrong 2024 is certainly on brand… once again it will be up to the grassroots activists to drag the limp corporate candidates to victory.
(Yes, I know governor Newsom is a centrist Clinton-type politician but unlike the rest of that ilk he has not been mummified)
birgerjohanssonsays
People who are alone this Xmas. Like “A” who does not even have royal titles anymore.
Turning Point USA’s flagship event, AmericaFest, devolved into a verbal food fight on Thursday evening as two right-wing titans traded salvos onstage and revealed a bitter divide in MAGA world.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro came out swinging, spending much of his half-hour speech laying into far-right influencers like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, describing their rhetoric as increasingly antisemitic and conspiratorial in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shooting death in September.
In a more surprising turn, Shapiro chastised the man who would take the stage after him, Tucker Carlson, for hosting Fuentes on his podcast last month and platforming a man former Vice President Mike Pence once described as “a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier.”
“There is a reason that Charlie Kirk despised Nick Fuentes,” Shapiro said. “He knew that Nick Fuentes is an evil troll and that building him up is an act of moral imbecility, and that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did.”
Shapiro dug further into Carlson:
“He built Nick Fuentes up, and he ought to take responsibility for that.”
Carlson wasn’t the only AmericaFest speaker caught in Shapiro’s sights. The 41-year-old co-founder of The Daily Wire also unloaded on former White House strategist Steve Bannon over his recent rhetoric surrounding Israel.
“When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country, he’s not actually making an argument based on evidence,” Shapiro said, following up with an allegation over Bannon’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
“He’s simply maligning people that he disagrees with, which is indeed par for the course from a man who was once a P.R. flack for Jeffrey Epstein,” Shapiro said, without clarifying the claim.
New photos released by House Democrats on Thursday show Bannon and Epstein sitting across from each other at a desk.
“I laughed that kind of bitter, sardonic laugh that emerges from you in like, upside-down world,” Carlson said of Shapiro’s speech. “It’s not supposed to work this way, to hear calls for de-platforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event.”
Carlson spent some of his speech defending against Shapiro’s allegations of antisemitism.
“Antisemitism is immoral. In my religion, it is immoral to hate people for how they were born. Period,” Carlson said.
He then tried to downplay the existence of the MAGA infighting that Shapiro laid bare minutes before.
“The Trump coalition, and the supposed civil war going on within that group — I don’t think it’s real,” he said. “I think it’s fake. I think it’s totally fake.”
But the drama in MAGA world appears to be ramping up. In the moments after their speeches, Owens took to X to reaffirm her baseless claims that Israel was somehow involved in Charlie Kirk’s killing. [That will add fuel to the fire. More verbal fights can be expected.]
She posted: “Every time Ben speaks I feel more certain Israel is involved.”
A Trojan horse Freedom of Information Act case in which Stephen Miller’s old group was trying to get a court to declare that the administrative functions of the judicial branch are part of the executive branch has been dismissed by U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden of D.C., a Trump appointee.
This case […] had the potential to provide a legal basis for the Trump White House to exercise considerable control — or at least pressure — over the judicial branch. There was never any indication that the White House had any hand in the case, but it didn’t seem like a stretch to assume it would have seized on a favorable ruling to assert more control over the Judicial Conference of the United States and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
It was always weird that a FOIA lawsuit was the vehicle for this effort. In that sense, McFadden’s ruling doesn’t tell us much about the larger constitutional interplay between the executive and judicial branches. He simply ruled that Congress had exempted itself and the courts from FOIA. The America First Legal Foundation argued that the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office weren’t part of the courts but part of the executive branch, and therefore not exempt from FOIA. McFadden ultimately ruled:
Because the Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office indeed fall outside FOIA’s reach, the Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction over the records request. So it will grant the motion to dismiss.
When the lawsuit was originally filed earlier this year, it came at a time of unprecedented conflict between the Trump administration and the judiciary. For the first time, the White House had tried to communicate with judicial branch employees directly via mass email. The General Services Administration was unilaterally talking about closing federal buildings around the country that house federal courts and court services. Federal judges were even expressing concern that their security protection by U.S. marshals — an executive branch agency — might be revoked or made contingent.
For now, an obscure FOIA lawsuit won’t be a backdoor way for the Trump White House to bring some critical elements of the judicial branch under its control.
Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan was convicted on one felony count and acquitted on one misdemeanor account for interfering with the ICE arrest of an undocumented immigrant in her courthouse.
My sense is all three of these things are true:
– The jury was careful and attentive and and took its job seriously.
– There are good grounds for Dugan to appeal.
– This case would never have been prosecuted under any other administration.
No doubt some of Trump’s appeal to some people is his willingness to act — to do something — even if it’s disproportionate, results in collective punishment, and is ultimately ineffective or even counterproductive.
On that note, last night the Trump administration immediately suspended the green card lottery system that allowed the Brown University/MIT shooter to enter the country during Trump I.
Another unlawful U.S. attack on two alleged drug-smuggling boats killed five people, brings the campaign’s known death toll to 104.
Meanwhile, CNN reports that the top lawyer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised Chairman Gen. Dan Caine in November that military commanders should request to retire if they receive an unlawful order.
Colorado’s two Democratic senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, are holding up the Senate appropriations package until Congress agrees to fully fund the National Center for Atmospheric Research and prevent its dismantling by the Trump administration. Miffed that Colorado officials rebuffed President Trump’s symbolic pardon of Tina Peters, the OMB [Russ Vought] announced it was breaking up the world-class research center in Boulder.
Another head/desk moment courtesy of Trump’s immigration policies:
The United States has slammed its doors shut to refugees, save for Afrikaners, the white South Africans descended from Dutch colonizers who imposed apartheid on the Black majority for decades. No real mystery why President Donald Trump supports letting these folks—and only these folks—come ashore.
But how can the administration best make these racists feel welcome? […] what better way than including a Trump biography for children ages 8-12 in every welcome packet? That’s what the administration is proposing, according to Reuters.
Even better? How about an Andrew Jackson biography too? Trump loves Jackson, who was a bone-deep racist, enslaved hundreds of Black people, and oversaw the mass displacement and murder of Native Americans.
Oh, and also the “1776 Report,” the first Trump administration’s slapdash racist rejoinder to the 1619 Project. Include that one too.
Not to let racists have all the fun, the proposal also suggests including a Family Research Council report on religious freedom, highlighting the organization’s eternal quest to make sure homophobic business owners get to discriminate against same-sex couples. […]
Refugees have received U.S. history materials in the past, but according to veteran refugee workers who spoke with Reuters, those materials haven’t promoted specific presidents or views. But Fred Cooper, a Trump pick serving as a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, apparently wants to change all that […]
[…] Since this is the Trump administration, where everything is as tacky as it is awful, the biography that Cooper wants to include looks low-rent as hell. Sporting the ChatGPT-ass title of “Donald Trump Biography for Kids: An Inspirational Story of One of America’s Most Famous Presidents” and an author listed only as “EverNest Press,” it feels a lot like an attempt to juice some sales for a pal who wrote a terrible book.
[…] Meanwhile, the United States continues to try to get these most racist of racists to come to America. By and large, Afrikaners don’t want to move to America to be racist here. They want to stay in South Africa and be racist there in whites-only enclaves.
[…] [Details of USA interfering in South African deportation plans for seven Kenyan nationals.] Yes, it appears the U.S. may be interfering in the immigration authority of another country so we can fast-track the one group of immigrants Trump likes, only to then possibly shower them with tacky right-wing propaganda once they’re stateside. […]
[…] Trump’s name is being affixed to the outside of the Kennedy Center just one day after its board—which he stacked with his allies—voted to add Dear Leader’s name to the cultural center. And they’re doing it in violation of federal law.
Democratic Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey said in a post on X that if work was indeed taking place to “physically change the sign on the Kennedy Center,” then it “needs to stop as it’s illegal to change without Congress.”
Photos taken of the building on Friday clearly show Trump’s name being added.
That’s proof positive that the board’s so-called vote was basically fixed and that Trump’s lackeys planned to put his name on the building, no matter what. The vote was merely a way for them to make their illegal move appear legitimate.
Trump himself played dumb on Thursday, saying he had no idea the name change was happening but that it is a huge honor—even though he had mused about the name change earlier this month. [video]
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Department of Justice (DOJ) would not be releasing the full Epstein files on Friday as required under new legislation, instead sending over a partial batch.
Blanche told Fox News the Justice Department would release “several hundred thousand” documents on Friday, “and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more.”
Blanche attributed the delay to the need to redact any names or identifying information about witnesses, but failing to turn over the full unclassified files could run afoul of the law, which gave the department 30 days to publicly share the documents.
“So today is the 30 days when I expect that we’re going to release several hundred thousand documents today. And those documents will come in in all different forms, photographs and other materials associated with, with all of the investigations into, into Mr. Epstein,” Blanche said. […]
While the bill does allow for redactions related to victims and for DOJ to withhold some information about the investigation, it does not provide a rolling deadline to turn over the documents.
Under the law, the DOJ has 15 days to turn over its rationale for any documents withheld.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said not releasing the required files in full amounts to breaking the law.
“The law Congress passed and President Trump signed was clear as can be – the Trump administration had 30 days to release ALL the Epstein files, not just some. Failing to do so is breaking the law. This just shows the Department of Justice, Donald Trump, and Pam Bondi are hellbent on hiding the truth,” Schumer said in a statement on Friday. […]
Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, said they were “now examining all legal options in the face of this violation of federal law.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of a bipartisan duo that pushed to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, posted a screenshot of the bill on X with the language of the 30-day deadline highlighted. […]
The Trump administration will appeal a federal judge’s ruling that declared the rescission of $2.6 billion in federal funds from Harvard University was unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a September ruling describing the White House crackdown on the Ivy League institution as “a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” according to The Associated Press.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said funds were revoked due to the school’s failure to address antisemitism on campus.
However, Burroughs said the Trump administration didn’t follow the proper federal process before revoking federal dollars.
Despite White House lawyers filing a notice of appeal, Harvard says it “remain confident in our legal position.”
“The federal district court ruled in Harvard’s favor in September, reinstating critical research funding that advances science and life-saving medical breakthroughs, strengthens national security, and enhances our nation’s competitiveness and economic priorities,” Harvard said, per the AP.
School officials have been embroiled in court battles involving the Trump administration. Earlier this year, Harvard won a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration in its lawsuit against the federal government’s attempt to block Harvard from admitting and keeping its foreign students.
The Trump administration separately threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and has launched multiple investigations into the university. […]
“Trump Gives WARFIGHTERS ‘Warrior Bonus’ Checks Stolen From Their Military Housing $$$”
We didn’t watch Donald Trump’s weird Wednesday night rant thing where, we hear, he told Americans all about the wonderful things he’s done for us, and [complained that we are] not loving him enough for it, just because prices are high and everybody is far more stressed out than we were before he came back and started fucking things up. […]
We also saw something on Bluesky about Trump giving members of the military checks for $1,776, and it would supposedly come from all the money rolling in from the beautiful tariffs […] that’s not how taxing and spending works, at least not legally. […]
But then we came across another Bluesky message that really got our attention: Trump was making shit up again, because the funding for the “Warrior Dividend” payments wasn’t coming from his stupid tariffs, and it wasn’t a special gift for Christmas, either. Trump was talking about taking some extra funding for housing that Congress already approved in July, and handing it out as a beautiful new “bonus,” thank you for your service.
We guess the regifting of funds that military members were already expecting to get is no surprise, really. Trump has always been a master of bait and switch.
For what it’s worth, here’s Trump bragging about the “warrior dividend” in his weird ranty speech Wednesday. You don’t really have to watch it, but knowing that the funding was already included in the Big Beautiful […] for Billionaires Bill that Republicans passed in July will help you appreciate some verbal sleight of tiny hand slipped into the announcement. We like the bit at the beginning where he bobbles the number of service members he’s reading off the teleprompter. […] [Video]
TRUMP: One thousand, four hundred fifty thousand … 1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call, warrior dividend before Christmas. A warrior dividend. In honor of our nation’s founding in 1776, we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that.
And the checks are already on the way. Nobody understood that one until about 30 minutes ago.
Translation: Trump didn’t understand that until about 30 minutes before he said it.
Then it was time for the fib that had fact-checkers scrambling.
We made a lot more money than anybody thought because of tariffs, and the bill helped us along. Nobody deserves it more than our military, and I say congratulations to everybody
That line about the tariffs made it into most of the stories about the “dividend,” often with a note explaining, as Politifact did, that “typically an expenditure this large would require Congress to pass a law making the appropriation, which wouldn’t have happened if the checks are already in the mail, as he said.” The story also noted that this was yet another of the endless Festivus Miracles that Trump has claimed would be paid for by tariff revenue, such as the “$2000 checks” every American has not received, or the elimination of the income tax […]
But yes, Politifact had it right: Normally, Congress would have to approve spending like that. And of course, it did, and it had fuck-all to do with tariffs. Did you spot that throwaway mention, “the bill helped us along”? It didn’t simply “help,” it was where all the money came from. […]
As Defense One reported Thursday, a “senior administration official” confirmed that the funds would be coming from a $2.9 billion appropriation Congress passed to “supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement […]”
Honestly, the real surprise here is that Trump didn’t boast in the speech that he’d personally made certain the fake “dividend” was tax-free. The Defense Department announcement of the mentions that service members will receive the “dividend” as a “nontaxable supplement to their regular monthly housing allowance,” but also tries to maintain the fiction that it’s a special gift, with a headline boasting “Just In Time For Christmas, Nation Gifts Service Members $1,776 ‘Warrior Dividend.’”
A few paragraphs down, just before the bit about how it’s part of the basic housing allowance, the press release acknowledges the additional BAH money “came earlier this year as part of the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill,” so good on whatever Pentagon press flack slipped in some reality.
[…] In the enlisted ranks, military families often struggle to make ends meet, and frequently fall victim to scammy payday lenders. Trump made that situation worse by ending protections against such scammers this summer, with the elimination of the “Office of Servicemember Affairs” in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, yet another agency he’s trying to kill without congressional approval.
[…] it’s incredibly on-brand cynicism for Trump to take money they’d be getting anyway, slap a Christmas bow on it, and call it a “Warrior Dividend” — and to lie that it’s all coming from his stupid tariffs, not an existing appropriation.
But that’s just another Trump lie that’ll get lost in a sea of lies, and only some progressive bloggers will care about Trump’s BAH humbug.
Taking money away from the Military Housing funds is not good. Some military families live in housing infested with roaches, or in housing with leaks that cause black mold to flourish. Other military housing issues include: contaminated water supplies, faulty HVAC and structural problems.
[…] Parker Molloy notes on Bluesky that the New York Times’s David Brooks, who wrote that the Epstein Files were “overblown” and we should “move on,” is in them. Is that bad? […]
“MELISSA HORTMAN DIED IN A SHOCKING ACT OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE. THIS IS THE STORY OF HER LIFE”
“The Minnesota Speaker’s closest friends and family open up for the first time”
Let me tell you about Melissa Hortman.
[…] It is the winter of 2024. Hortman is now the speaker of the Minnesota House. She has just been instrumental in passing the Minnesota Miracle, a “holy shit” 30-point piece of legislation that protects and offers a hand up to the state’s neediest citizens. Now, she is at a retreat along with the other members of her Democratic Farmer Labor caucus. There is much to celebrate, perhaps too much. A legislator knocks back one too many of Hortman’s Patron Silver margaritas. The next morning, he is, let us say, unwell. She knocks on his hotel door and leaves him some Advil.
“You just stay here as long as you need,” says Hortman before closing the door.
[…] Let me tell you about Melissa Hortman. She arrives at caucus meetings, her blond hair still wet, and, well, always a little late. Under her arm is a policy binder and an oversize purse. […]
In the early hours of June 14, 2025, Melissa Hortman, her husband, Mark, and their dog, Gilbert, are murdered in their Brooklyn Park home. The killer is dressed as a cop and carries a death list of Minnesota Democratic lawmakers. (State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife are also shot. They both recover.)
[…] Here we are again. Hortman’s murder was preceded by two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, a botched murder plot against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the fire-bombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home. It is followed by the Charlie Kirk assassination three months later.
[…] These days, we doomscroll to the next atrocity, our outrage for the anonymous dead anesthetized […]
The pain only lingers when it is someone we know or someone we think we know from TV or Instagram. I can tell you that Melissa Hortman would be pissed off if her murder meant more to you than, say, the killing of a homeless vet in downtown Minneapolis. But the dead don’t get to make that call. The June massacre of 10 students by a suicidal gunman packing a Glock and a sawed-off shotgun in Graz, Austria, did not crush me. No, it was the murder of Melissa Hortman — a woman I met once — that dropped me to the carpet in my Los Angeles hotel room.
[…] this is not a story about Utah Sen. Mike Lee posting tweets after Melissa Hortman’s murder reading, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” and another one quipping, “Nightmare on Waltz street.” And this is not a story about late-night Fox News Gollum Greg Gutfeld suggesting Hortman knew her killer. (She did not.) And it is definitely not about Trump professing not to know who she was two months after her death and then insisting he would have flown flags at half-staff for Hortman if only Walz wasn’t such a jerk.
None of that is important. Williams, Hortman’s best friend, tells me she doesn’t even know the name of Melissa and Mark Hortman’s killer. “It does not matter how Melissa died,” Williams says in a whisper. “All that really matters is how she lived.”
[…] It is October 2024, and I am in Minneapolis covering Walz’s vice presidential campaign. One of Walz’s calling cards is 2023’s Minnesota Miracle, a dizzying array of social safety-net legislation that he and the state legislature passed. His staffers urge me to talk with someone named Melissa Hortman, who they claim is the true architect of the policies.
I drive to a St. Paul coffee shop near the state Capitol. I am having a bad day; I have fucked up my neck and shoulder, but with the tumult of the presidential campaign, I’ve not made it to a doctor. I am in excruciating pain and even more addled than usual as I slide into a chair across from her. She senses something is amiss and gives me some grace.
“Take your time, get settled, I’m not going anywhere.”
This may seem like nothing, but I’ve been doing this a while. It is definitely something.
She then speaks frankly about Walz and how they share a belief in spending political capital, not hoarding it, and the George Floyd protests, to a degree that her press aide’s eyebrows shoot up like a surprised cartoon character. Later, I learn this is classic Hortman. […]
This story is written in the present tense. Why? Not one of the dozens of family, friends, and colleagues I interviewed can bear to refer to Hortman in the past tense. Maybe it is a coping mechanism, or maybe it is a belief that her achievements are a living, breathing thing. […]
How It Begins
A brother and sister scramble through John’s Auto Parts in Blaine, Minnesota. They open the doors of Novas and Pontiacs before they are pulverized, looking for change or other treasures. The older boy is Patrick, an incorrigible lad who sometimes arrives home with only one shoe, is allergic to most foods, and will right himself in time to graduate from MIT at the age of 20. Right behind him is his sensible sister. She is born Melissa but goes by Missy because she has a speech impediment and can’t get all the letters out. […]
This is not your regular boneyard. Early in the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency sends Harold a notice with a heavy fine, claiming oil and tire residue has soaked into the ground and their property is going to become one of the agency’s first cleanup sites. The notice turns the Haluptzoks into accidental environmentalists. They negotiate an extension and clean up their property.
Both Linda and Harold self-identify as type A personalities, so it doesn’t stop there. He writes a book on how to run an environmentally safe junkyard. Eventually, the couple own five salvage yards and travel around the world giving speeches on how to crush cars and remain on speaking terms with Mother Earth.
Missy notices it all and has questions.
“How do you keep the oil safe? How does a business work? What is global warming?”
Her parents try explaining, but mostly they just let her watch. At 10, she is obsessed with the 1980 presidential election. She tells her mom something very important: “I am going to be the first female president.”
Melissa wants to go to Harvard. “Kids from Blaine don’t go to Harvard,” explains her counselor. She applies anyway. She doesn’t get in. She goes to Boston University. Four years later, she graduates with honors and applies to Harvard Law School. No dice. Instead, she returns home and goes to the University of Minnesota Law School. Decades later, she applies to the Harvard Kennedy School. She gets in and earns her master’s.
[…] It is the summer of 1992. Melissa is working in Sen. John Kerry’s office. She goes to the D.C. office of the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America program and fills out an application to mentor a kid in need. A young man watches her. He times turning in his own application to coincide with hers.
[…] Mark says no to his parents’ offer to set him up in the family’s thriving printing business. He and Melissa are engaged three months after they start dating. They marry and settle in Brooklyn Park, about 15 minutes from where she grew up. […]
Mark works in the tech world, and on the side invents a robot to make his morning oats and, years later, a weeding robot that can tell the difference between weeds and flowers. He builds his own speakers and talks about how much he loves the band Soul Coughing. Melissa rolls her eyes, dreams of policy conferences and being asleep by 8:30.
The couple have Colin and Sophie quickly, just like Harold and Linda had Missy and Patrick. Melissa works for Central Minnesota Legal Services as a housing lawyer and represents Stormy Harmon, a mother of three left homeless after her landlord refused to fix her furnace. Hortman proves the landlord has a persistent pattern of making racist threats and harassing Harmon’s children. Despite the landlord maintaining his innocence, Hortman wins Harmon the largest jury award for a single family’s race-based housing-discrimination claim in state history to date.
Enough already, that’s what Melissa Hortman would say at this point: “Why do we gotta do all this tomfoolery, this turkey dance? Why am I doing all this bullshit? Let’s just do the thing right now.”
[…] Hortman runs for state representative but loses in both 1998 and 2002. Part of it is demographics — her Brooklyn Park district is traditional suburban GOP — and part of it is Hortman’s honesty. She knocks on hundreds of doors, and when a mom says she is against something, say, gay marriage, Hortman doesn’t dance around it, she locks eyes and tells the mom gay marriage is simply about equality for everyone. In 2004, she squeezes past the incumbent by 400 votes.
The universal rule for freshmen reps is sit down, shut up, and let seniority get things done. Hortman doesn’t really abide by that. In her first term, Minnesota is bogged down in a budget deadlock. Hortman and a group of ad hoc legislators from both parties meet and brainstorm ideas that they pass on to House leaders. The ideas help break the logjam, and the budget passes.
[…] she pushes through a bill that provides tax breaks to businesses using solar energy and mandates that Minnesota utilities obtain 1.5 percent of their electricity from solar by 2020.
How proud is she? Go look up her X bio. It cites only one achievement: Author of MN’s solar standard and community solar law.
Two years later, she attends the Paris Climate Conference. She smiles as international legislators ask her in multiple languages how they can craft a similar bill. […]
She keeps moving up the ladder in the House. By 2017, Hortman is minority leader. That April, there’s a debate in the House on a bill that would increase the criminal penalties for civil protests that block roads and highways. Minnesota is 20 percent minority, but there are 16 representatives of color at the time. Many speak against the bill. Rena Moran speaks of how her great-great grandmother was a slave and how her family’s progress can be marked by their freedom to protest injustice.
Hortman listens and gets angry. Few representatives are in their seats. Many of them are in the House lounge playing poker.
“I hate to break up the 100 percent white-male card game, but I think this is an important debate,” Hortman says.
One of those hearing her remarks is Rep. Moran. “She sees us, she hears us,” thinks Moran.
Hortman’s remarks incense Minnesota House Republicans.
“Minority Leader, would you apologize to the body?”
She will not.
“I have no intention of apologizing,” says Hortman. “I am so tired of watching Rep. Susan Allen give an amazing speech, Rep. Peggy Flanagan give an amazing speech, watching Rep. Jamie Becker Finn give an amazing speech, Rep. Rena Moran give the most heartfelt, incredible speech I’ve heard on this House floor as long as I can remember, watching Rep. Ilhan Omar give an amazing speech, and looking around, to see, ‘Where are my colleagues?’ … And I’m really tired of watching women of color, in particular, being ignored. So, I’m not sorry.”
The 2018 election is just around the corner […] Hortman recruits candidates and stresses that ads and yard signs do not matter, you must go door to door. […] she personally door-knocks in every contested district. […]
On May 25, 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, kills George Floyd, a Black man, by placing him in a chokehold and slamming his knee onto his windpipe. Floyd gasps and calls for his mother before he suffocates to death.
The city erupts into fiery protests with stores burned out and police stations set afire. During the worst nights, Hortman and her deputies maintain a phone line where reps can report violence in their districts, and she routes the calls directly to the state emergency-operations center. At her urging, the governor calls a special session of the legislature to deal with police reform.
One of Hortman’s first calls is to Moran. She knows that as one of the few members of color in the House it is essential that Moran lead the efforts to pass a police-reform bill that will have the greatest impact in inner-city districts like the one Moran represents. Moran has her doubts.
“That is not what I do, I’m not even on the public-safety committee,” Moran says.
“Doesn’t matter,” Hortman says. “You’re going to do it.”
And Moran does it. In July, the House passes a police-reform law that somehow passes the Republican-controlled Senate and is signed into law by Walz. The bill prohibits chokeholds like the one that killed Floyd and creates an independent body to investigate police officers accused of sexual assault or killing a civilian. The bill also prohibits police departments from offering overly aggressive “warrior-style training.” […]
Melissa Hortman doesn’t mind when other legislators call her the caucus mom. […] She’s a mom, and she will not apologize.
That normalcy makes the fact that in 2023 Minnesota House Speaker Hortman passes the most sweeping social legislation in Minnesota history […] all the more remarkable.
Go to the state House and see it for yourself. Hortman’s greatest achievement hangs on the wall in the Minnesota State Capitol Building. “Top Bills for 2023 Session” read two poster boards, each with 15 policy goals, 30 in total. All 30 have check marks indicating “passed” and “enacted.” […]
After George Floyd’s death, protesters march outside the governor’s mansion, and they march in front of 8710 Windsor Terrace. This is one of the few things in life that freaks out the legendarily unflappable Hortman.
Colleagues tell her it will be fine; the protesters just want to be heard. Then Jan. 6 happens. Protesters try to break into the governor’s mansion. Other Minnesota legislators have protesters outside their homes, walking the streets with rifles, taking advantage of the state’s open-carry laws.
Hortman is alone. Her kids are grown and out of the house, and Mark is down in Naples, Florida, where his father has just had triple-bypass surgery. She gets a call from the Minnesota State Police that there has been a credible threat against her safety, and it would be best if she could leave the metropolitan area for a few days. So, Hortman calls Colin and the two drive 200 miles north into Minnesota’s Iron Range. They check into a lodge […]
But Hortman is still scared. She calls state Rep. Ryan Winkler, her top deputy, and tells him she’s done.
“I can’t do this. I think I need to quit. I need to walk away.”
He tries to calm her.
“Melissa, you’re going to go check into a hotel. Get away from your house. Go someplace where nobody knows where you are.”
[…] Melissa Hortman wakes up to a different world on Nov. 6, 2024. There’s the disappointment of the Harris-Walz defeat and Hortman’s hold on the speakership is tenuous. The Minnesota State House is deadlocked at 67-67. The Republicans play hardball […]
Back at the Capitol, there remains a table of remembrance to “Our Beloved Melissa” outside the House chambers. Her name is still listed alphabetically on the wall with the other representatives.
A floor above, Gov. Tim Walz looks much older than when I talked with him a year ago on the top floor of a church in Savannah, Georgia, where the windows were blacked out with campaign posters so that a sniper would not have a clear shot. Now, he sits in his office with a single aide and makes small talk about meeting Neil Young last weekend at Farm Aid. But his smile quickly fades. Walz spent the summer in torment, thinking of his conversations with Hortman and how she should be Minnesota’s next governor.
“I think she was thinking about it,” Walz says. He sighs and rubs his eyes. Melissa’s death left him grappling with whether to retire or run again.
“I know I have been deeply damaged by this,” Walz says in a quiet voice. “We all have.”
[…] On my last day in Minnesota, I drive north to Brooklyn Park and the house at 8710 Windsor Terrace. I’d avoided visiting the house for two weeks, reasoning this story was about Hortman’s life, not how it ended. But it’s time to confront the damage done.
[…] The windows have been boarded up with plywood in the front and the back to protect against vandals. The front lawn, while carefully mowed, is brown and lifeless. A grill sits on the deck facing the golf course and conjures up a lonely John Cheever short story. What once was the warmest of homes is now an overrun fortress from a meaningless war.
[…] She wouldn’t have stood there, helpless, and moony-eyed. No, she would have asked a single question.
“Are you gonna stand there and moan, or are you going to help me pull these damn weeds?
moving to deport asylum seekers to third countries like Uganda, Ghana, Eswatini, or El Salvador, and directing them to seek asylum there instead.
“All of a sudden, in every single case, the DHS attorneys all at once began filing motions to have asylum seekers sent to countries they have no connection to and often don’t even speak the language of. It was unnerving to say the least,” said one immigration attorney who has been witnessing that scene play out in Lower Manhattan since last week.
In the Bay Area, there are 50 such cases currently pending […] asking for these removals with “pretermit” motions, which essentially ask a judge to dismiss an asylum claim without a full evidentiary hearing.
[…]
“Many of these DHS attorneys are young and are clearly following marching orders,” […] During one of the hearings, the [DHS] attorney told the judge that “Central America is up for interpretation and that Mexico is a part of Central America,” […] The judge then asked the DHS attorney if they believed the U.S. or Canada was part of Central America and […] the attorney replied: I don’t know.
[…]
“Starting in late November here in the San Francisco, Concord, and Sacramento courts, we’ve seen them getting filed in a huge number of cases,” […] DHS attorneys say in open court that they have been told to file these third-country motions to Honduras and Guatemala for every Spanish speaker who entered the country after 2019. […] “Which is nuts,”
[…]
There is a caveat, though: These cooperative-agreement countries have a cap on immigrants they will take. For example, in the deal with Honduras, the U.S. can only send up to 10 deportees a month for 24 months. Each country has its own cap. […] “Certain governments, having seen what the U.S. does to countries that don’t fall in line, they’re going to say, ‘the least we can do is say that we’ll accept people, whether we actually ever accept them or not,'”
[…]
several “concerning” issues with these motions. For one, […] immigration judges do not have the right to question DHS attorneys whether these receiving countries will actually take the asylum seekers. And second, even though there is a cap on people who can be sent to a third country […] “[DHS] was making these in almost every single case […] “A third problem is that every single country that we have an ACA agreement with has an abysmal human rights record,” […]
the Trump administration is deploying this strategy en masse because “it’s a relatively easy and fast way to get rid of cases.” […] the Trump administration has abandoned simply dismissing cases and arresting immigrants at courthouses because there were a lot of community protests and flareups, garnering headlines and pushback.
[…]
Let’s say a Guatemalan person tells [a judge] they don’t want to go to Honduras because it’s not their home, and they’re afraid to go there. […] “That showing will be incredibly hard […] simply by the fact that they have never been to Honduras, and they can’t tell me I lived there for five years and I experienced a lot of discrimination or harm,”
[…]
“Once that removal order is in place, the government doesn’t necessarily have to send them to Honduras […] They could just say you have a removal order, and we’re going to detain you now. And we could send you somewhere else.”
[…]
immigrant rights lawyers and groups are trying to respond, by scrambling to provide as much free legal counsel to asylum seekers as they can, and to create template legal motions to fight the third-country removals. Many of the immigrants who show up in court are pro se, which means they are representing themselves.
I witnessed this insanity today. 7 cases I observed in a row went as follows: [Russian to Uganda, Pakistani to Uganda, Venezuelan to Ecuador, Ecuadorian to Honduras, Nepalese to Uganda, Nepalese to Uganda, Chinese to Uganda].
Even if a Venezuelan asylum seeker could prove that they face imminent danger in Ecuador, the government will just file a motion to send them to Honduras, and then Uganda, ad infinitum…
The asylum-seeking process before Trump was unfair, confusing, and evil. Obviously, his administration has been committed to making it worse since day 1. But the sheer maliciousness behind each and every step they take to doom some of the most vulnerable people in the world is disgusting.
“A Russian missile, filled with U.S. tech, rips a Ukrainian boy’s life apart”
“Despite export controls, weapons with Western components show up on Ukrainian soil nightly, killing and maiming civilians.”
At the moment Russia launched the nearly four-ton ballistic missile, an 8-year-old Ukrainian boy was running across a playground.
The missile was an Iskander 9M723, fresh off an assembly line in Votkinsk, where workers in the Russian heartland plug American technology into the bellies of guided weapons, despite sanctions and export controls, Ukrainian investigators have found.
By late 2025, Russia had launched more than 400 of the Iskander-M rockets. This one, which took flight on April 4, was the 64th of the year. The Kremlin claimed that it was targeting a meeting of military officials at a restaurant, though surveillance footage showed only civilians there.
The boy was second-grader Matviy Holovko. His hometown of Kryvyi Rih, an industrial hub where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky grew up, suffered such frequent bombardment that he’d grown used to sleeping in the hallway. […]
the Iskander was whipping toward them. Twenty-three football fields a second. Six times the speed of sound.
Every time one of these missiles lands, destroying power plants, hospitals, churches and schools, investigators search for clues in the wreckage. […] Though the weapons are manufactured in Russia, they are dependent on components from companies based in other countries, including the United States. Investigators have found parts from Intel. Parts from Analog Devices, best known for its semiconductors. Parts from Texas Instruments, famous for its graphing calculators. [Map and list showing sources of components. Most come from the USA, 27 components.]
[…] A Senate subcommittee report published last year said that efforts by American companies to trace their products into Russia’s war machine have been “abjectly lacking.” […] [I snipped details revealing the damage, the deaths, and the aftermath.]
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as GUR, catalogues these components in a public database. By 2024, the agency had identified around 2,800 foreign components in Russian weapons. By late 2025, that number surpassed 5,200. About 70 percent of the parts come from companies headquartered in the United States.
A year-long investigation by the subcommittee’s Democratic staff found that some companies had “done the bare minimum required by law … while trying to wash their hands of any real responsibility for their distributors’ role in Russian diversion.”
“Russian bombs, missiles and drones supported by American technologies are literally killing Ukrainians,” subcommittee Chairman Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) told executives from Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel in late 2024. “Not just Ukrainian soldiers, but civilians, women, children, in their sleep, in hospitals, in schools, purposefully, relentlessly.”
[…] Microelectronics, which trickle through unsanctioned countries such as China and Turkey, are nearly impossible to track from manufacturer to rocket missile, said one Ukrainian intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
[…] Satellite data and public records showed the expansion of the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant, where Iskanders are mass-produced. New workshops, thousands of additional workers. Production tripled from 2022 to 2025.
The plant now averages about 60 to 70 new Iskanders per month, said aviation expert and military analyst Kostiantyn Kryvolap, a former test engineer at the Antonov Design Bureau in Kyiv. The Iskander’s accuracy and ability to evade air defense remain dependent on Western components, which Russia has not managed to replace with its own parts, he said.
[…] By late 2025, the Kremlin was launching 12 times as many Iskanders as in 2023. The volume of Shahed drones increased 20 times over in the same two-year period. […]
“Leaders opted to raise common debt rather than leverage frozen Russian assets to finance the loan.”
EU taxpayers will have to pay €3 billion per year in borrowing costs as part of a plan to raise common debt to finance Ukraine’s defense against Russia, according to senior European Commission officials.
The bloc’s leaders agreed in the early hours of Friday to raise €90 billion for the next two years, backed by the EU budget, to ensure Kyiv’s war chest won’t run dry in April.
The war-ravaged country faces a budget shortfall of €71.7 billion next year and is in desperate need of funds to ensure its survival after Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to keep the conflict going on Friday.
Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia will not join the bloc’s other 24 countries in sharing the debt burden, but agreed not to obstruct Ukraine’s financing needs. […]
Many of the hallmarks of the €210 billion financing package for Ukraine will be transferred to the new plan for common debt. These include payout structures in tranches, anti-corruption safeguards, and an outline for how much money should be spent on Kyiv’s military and the country’s budgetary needs.
[…] The new plan would provide Ukraine with €45 billion next year, handing Kyiv a crucial lifeline as it enters its fifth year of fighting. The remaining funds would be disbursed in 2027.
The new plan won’t come cheap. The EU is expected to pay €3 billion annually in interest from 2028 through its seven-year budget, which is largely financed by EU governments […] Interest payments would begin in 2027, but would cost only €1 billion that year.
Ukraine will only have to repay the loan once Russia ends the war and pays war reparations. That seems unlikely, which means the EU could continuously roll over the debt or use frozen Russian assets to repay it.
That would require another political agreement among EU leaders, as Belgium is strongly opposed to using the frozen assets, most of which are held in the Brussels-based financial depository Euroclear. […]
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday lambasted NATO chief Mark Rutte for his recent warning to prepare for a large-scale war with Russia.
“What are you even talking about? I really want to ask: Listen, what are you saying about preparing to go to war with Russia? Can you even read? Read the U.S. National Security Strategy,” Putin said, at an annual event where he responds to questions from journalists and the general public.
Rutte said last week in Berlin that NATO is Russia’s next target after Ukraine and that alliance members must shift to a “wartime mindset” and “we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great grandparents endured.”
Putin dismissed those remarks Friday as aggressive and said that if the U.S. — NATO’s traditional backbone — does not see Russia as an “enemy or target” in its new controversial security strategy, Rutte should not point NATO toward war with Russia.
[…] “In the new strategy, Russia is not named as an enemy or a target … and the NATO secretary-general is getting ready to go to war with us. What is this? Can you even read? Why are you aiming NATO at entering in war with Russia if NATO’s main country does not see us as an enemy?” Putin blasted.
Trump’s document stops short of identifying Russia as a threat to American security. Instead, it targets traditional allies in Europe, warning that they face “civilizational erasure” in part due to migration and portraying them as obstacles to efforts aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin praised the document, asserting that it aligns with Russia’s own vision and signaling Moscow’s approval of Washington’s new direction. [!]
[…] the state of Georgia dropped its criminal case against Donald Trump — who, according to multiple prosecutors and voluminous evidence, also plotted against his government and tried to hold onto office despite the will of the voters. [I snipped a comparison to Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president.]
It was in August 2023 when Trump was first criminally indicted in Georgia, with charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the state’s results in the 2020 presidential election. The case took all kinds of twists and turns in the months that followed, but this September, the Georgia Supreme Court ultimately ended the lead prosecutor’s involvement in the case, which unraveled soon after.
This was the last remaining opportunity to hold the president accountable for his alleged 2020 election crimes (special counsel Jack Smith’s case was derailed by Trump’s reelection), and when prosecutors pulled the plug, Trump claimed vindication as if he’d been exonerated.
But that didn’t make sense: The demise of the case had less to do with its merits and more to do with the disqualification of Fani Willis, the prosecutor who brought the case, and her undisclosed relationship with Nathan Wade, whom she’d appointed as the special prosecutor.
Indeed, not only has the public seen evidence to suggest Trump did exactly what he was accused of doing, but previously undisclosed evidence continues to come out. The New York Times reported:
In a newly obtained recording of a phone call from late 2020, President Trump can be heard pressing the speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives to hold a special legislative session to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss.
After citing false conspiracy theories of election fraud in Georgia, Mr. Trump told David Ralston, the speaker at the time, in the call on Dec. 7, 2020, that he could justify calling a special legislative session by saying it was ‘for transparency, and to uncover fraud.’
“Who’s gonna stop you for that?” the defeated president asked.
“A federal judge, possibly,” Ralston replied.
The Times’ report added that the newspaper obtained a recording of the call […] as “part of a trove of investigative documents generated” in the case.
This isn’t the only relevant phone call. As many Americans likely recall, Trump called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Saturday, Jan. 2, 2021, and told the Georgian he wanted someone to “find” enough votes to flip the state’s election results, even if that meant overturning the will of the voters. The president added, while pressuring Raffensperger, “[T]here’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
Raffensperger recorded the call and offered the public the opportunity to hear Trump explore ways to cheat, begging others to participate in his scheme and even making some subtle threats toward the state’s top elections official. I’ve long believed it was the most controversial phone call ever recorded in American history.
But roughly a month earlier, Trump also called the state House speaker and lied about the election results as part of a legally dubious lobbying campaign to overturn his defeat in Georgia.
Ralston, before his death in 2022, shared details of the conversation to special grand jurors investigating the election scandal, which in turn contributed to Trump’s indictment. It wasn’t until this week that the audio recording reached the public. [!]
We’ll never know what might’ve happened if the case had proceeded to a jury, although given the available information, the president ought to feel great relief that the prosecution was derailed for reasons that had effectively nothing to do with his conduct.
Fox Business host Stuart Varney and his colleagues are trying their darndest to turn President Donald Trump’s […] economy into a Christmas ornament. And they brought in Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer to try and sell some of that delusional MAGA optimism. [video]
Chavez-DeRemer defended Trump’s economy by pointing to the recently released jobs report, which showed unemployment numbers reaching a four-year high. She explained that in her mind palace, a higher unemployment rate is a positive, suggesting it showed “more people are getting off the sideline and finally wanting to be part of the American economy and this workforce.”
But even Varney found that spin difficult to endorse, calling it “an interesting diplomatic move.”
Fox contributor Lauren Simonetti continued with more bad news, noting that the housing market has slowed considerably and consumer sentiment has dropped due to uncertainty and rising costs. But that didn’t stop Varney from spinning it himself.
“The weakness is attractive,” he said, regarding how the numbers might compel the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. “Bad news is actually good news for the market—maybe. Maybe.” [video]
Stuart: Also, the latest read on consumer sentiment, what’s that number?
Simonetti: It—surprise drop to 52.9. This is a December number. It’s the final number, so it’s pretty recent. Consumers are just worried about the price of things and long-run inflation expectations as well.
Stuart: But with rather these dull numbers, the market seems to like it, perhaps implying that we’ll get more Fed rate cuts.
Simonetti: Actually, the market went up a little bit, all the pieces of information being slightly weaker than expected.
Varney: The weakness is attractive. Bad news is actually good news for the market—maybe. Maybe.
Posted by readers of the article:
Varney is a GOP apologist at Fox Business. The state propaganda FOX machine is just stunningly mendacious. In that first video, calling a 64K job report “robust” is downright pathetic. Robust is > 200K. The monthly BLS jobs report average for Trump 2.0 is now running at 50K for Feb-Nov 2025, down from 185K in the last year for Biden (Feb 2024-Jan 2025), which was his worst year.
———————–
BWAHAHAHA! “Bad news is actually good news.”
And there you have it. The total inversion of reality so well known under tyrannical regimes.
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Bad news is good news
Secretary of State Marco Rubio held an end-of-year press conference on Friday, where he was asked about former Senate colleagues who have voiced criticism of his performance as a key figure in the Trump administration.
Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland have publicly expressed regret over voting to confirm Rubio, citing his abandonment of any principles or sound policy positions in a craven pursuit of power.
“We live in a very different time, unfortunately,” Rubio said, before launching into a rambling statement implying that privately, these senators still really like him. “I mean, there’s also not a lot of benefit to a Democratic senator saying what a great guy Marco Rubio is in this current political environment, or anyone in the Trump administration for that matter.” [video]
Rubio wants you to overlook a tanking economy, fascistic immigration raids terrorizing American cities, and unpopular tax breaks for the wealthy that come at the expense of Americans’ health care—and believe that people still like him for his personality.
I mean, we live in a very different time, unfortunately. I engaged with senators, for example, from both parties. We saw a bunch of them the other day, all the time and obviously–but politics today is very different than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It just is. I’m not in that anymore. I’m no longer in a political office, [WTF?] but I know political offices. I served 14 years in the Senate, and politics is real, right?
I mean, there’s also not a lot of benefit to a Democratic senator saying what a great guy Marco Rubio is in this current political environment, or anyone in the Trump administration for that matter. So all I will tell you is I get up every day. We go to work, we get work done. We do cooperate and work with–they don’t always agree with everything we’re doing, but I have a lot of people in the Senate, particularly chairmen of key committees that we interact with. There’s things people can say and do in the public that, because of politics in private, that they can’t say or do in public. But I don’t know what else to comment on that.
Marco Rubio has thoroughly politicized the office of Secretary of State. Also, Rubio has not risen to Trump levels of “most people don’t like you,” but he is getting there. In the video, Rubio is smug.
birgerjohanssonsays
3I/ATLAS Closest Approach // Rock Giants // New NASA Administrator
A memo from the FBI circulated to multiple law enforcement agencies described peaceful protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement as related to terrorism, a report published by The Guardian on Friday revealed.
The FBI is led by pro-Trump sycophant Kash Patel and overseen by Attorney General Pam Bondi, an unabashed promoter of Trump who has echoed his extremist rhetoric about detractors.
The memo, published on Nov. 14, claimed there was increased “threat activity targeting government personnel or facilities related to immigration enforcement efforts.” The document also alleged that “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity” are ongoing threats to the country, and falsely described anti-ICE protests in cities like Los Angeles and Portland as examples of “political violence,” according to The Guardian.
The memo reportedly cites activities like “conducting online research” about the movement of ICE agents and using encrypted messaging as an “indicator” that someone is planning an attack on an ICE facility.
Officials reportedly complain in the document that “domestic terrorist subjects” have been involved in “reactive violent attacks which took advantage of First Amendment-protected activities nationwide.”
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Guardian, “It is not illegal to do online research about the publicly available movements of government officers or to communicate through encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp.”
[…] The FBI memo’s key argument that ICE agents are under increased threat of violence is also not true. ICE has said attacks are up “1,000%” and more but a Los Angeles Times study of ICE-involved court cases showed no such increase in violence.
The Trump administration has tried to paint everyone who stands in opposition to its policies as a terrorist, i[…]
The FBI memo represents another instance of the Trump administration using the power of government to attack speech it doesn’t like.
“Russia’s Big Gamble Just Fell Apart – And It’s Bad for Putin”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=wp31HW75YqA
Putin: We have taken Kupjansk.
Zelensky: Has a photo taken of him standing in front of Kupjansk.
birgerjohanssonsays
Farron Cousins:
“Republicans Admit They’re Tired Of Toddler Trump’s Psycho Behavior”
sisters went to pick up some Taco Bell. […] Officers ignored Shirley’s questions and took her sister “forcefully” into one of the vans. They told Shirley they would let her go—but not her sister. […] “I showed them our identifications, and they didn’t pay me any attention, they went straight to my sister because she’s darker than me.”
[…]
“We [her attorneys] spent, I think, close to five hours waiting in Baltimore to speak to her, before we were told they had moved her out of state in the middle of the night […] we suspect they did this because they knew we were going to file the lawsuit.”
[…]
“The thing that’s been the most difficult so far is that, in all of our interactions with the government, they’re denying that any of her birth certificates, which are from Laurel, Maryland, her records of immunization, medical records—they’re denying the authenticity of them,” Perez said. “It is something I’ve never encountered in all my work as an attorney,” Perez said. “It’s infuriating.”
Diaz Morales’ situation is somewhat unusual. After being born in Maryland, she went to Mexico as a child but never obtained a U.S. passport. At some point, she entered the United States without documentation, fleeing what her attorneys described as an emergency, life-or-death situation […] a cartel. Reentering the country without documentation does not affect whether someone is a U.S. citizen, Diaz Morales’ attorneys noted.
[…]
“I called the hospital, and they were able to confirm she was a patient during that ‘general period […] This last part especially would be impossible to manufacture.[“]
Rando: “ICE really should have realized that no actual Mexicans would go to Taco Bell.”
birgerjohanssonsays
Ternary Computing: Theoretically Better than Binary
In the 1966 German science fiction TV series Raumpatrouille the aliens were indeed using ternary computing (You did not see it because Star Trek had started three weeks previously).
birgerjohanssonsays
“Westerly jet stream emerges as key driver of mid-latitude hydroclimatic extremes”
Warmer Arctic region makes jet stream ‘wavier’ making precipitation in the South more chaotic.
This intermediate vascular system 400 million years ago allowed plants to grow up to 20 cm – a huge leap from the millimeter-sized plants that came before them.
birgerjohanssonsays
How much does it cost to end rough sleeping? An Australian-first study may have just found out.
(Also, Finland is doing the right thing)
Haha!! [Politico] caught Lindsey Halligan trying to bury proof of her own incompetence.
Honestly, this lady should just avoid doing anything that might involve a court filing bc she has literally never gotten it right the first try.
[Article]: Prosecutors tried and failed to add 3rd felony charge against Letitia James […] Prosecutors also asked a magistrate judge to keep records of the proposed indictment sealed after grand jurors rejected all three alleged charges, but the judge declined
Not for the first time, the signature block for Self-Proclaimed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan spelled it “Virgina.”
/s/ Lindsey Halligan
United States Attorney
Eastern District of
Virgina Florida Bar
No. 109481 2100
Jamieson Avenue
Alexandria, VA 22314
Commentary
That sig block looks so wrong—even if Virginia were spelled correctly.
“Florida” is on the wrong line. It should be next to the Bar number. Also on the wrong line is the street number. Can these people do anything right?
At least she’s so grossly incompetent she cant be effective.
The Virgina Florida Bar is my favorite lesbian nightspot.
Well, she can’t legally be the US Atty for the Eastern District of Virginia, but they never said anything about the Eastern District of *Virgina*, did they?
Cartoon: No soul
Link back to previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/10/01/infinite-thread-xxxvii/comment-page-6/#comment-2287027
Washington Post link
“EXCLUSIVE: American Academy of Pediatrics loses HHS funding after criticizing RFK Jr.”
“HHS cuts key AAP grants, citing concerns about “identity-based language” and insufficient focus on agency priorities. The organization said the cuts could harm child health.”
New York Times link
“Venezuela’s Navy Begins Escorting Ships as U.S. Threatens Blockade”
CNN: “Former Swedish Prime Minister on how to end the Ukraine war”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=cgYAQZlrPK8
Remember, Carl Bildt is a conservative, but he is rejecting everything Trump stands for (it does not come up in this interview but he is no enemy of immigration).
Yes! The new Skepticrat has arrived, together with Noah, Heath Eli and Mike Marshall decanting absurd news.
“Skepticrat 261 Butter Emails Side Down Edition”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=8VmlRQ1xeBA
Link
See also comment 483 in the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.
NBC News:
Trump to declare war on Venezuela tonight, says Tucker Carlson
Rather than believing whatever Tucker Carlson says, let’s wait and see.
Discovery Future
“New Evidence Shows Vikings Were in America Much Longer Than We Thought”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=- mG2ciX8UlY
Follow-up to Lynna@7.
Reuters
Marianna Sotomayor (WaPo):
Sky Captain @11, JFC, what a lot of fuckery on the part of Republicans.
Thanks for the updated information.
Trump delivered a live speech on TV, supposed to touts the trumpian economy.
Here are some excerpts from NBC’s coverage:
Aussie PM Albo had a pressconference earlier today -saw parts of it whilst watching Adelaide Ashes cricket Test too – & has come up with, this -fromthe news articles summary bit at top :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-18/albanese-announces-tougher-hate-speech-laws-after-bondi-terror/106157020
See also amidst continuing aftermath coverage from the Bondi terrorist attack here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-18/bondi-beach-shooting-terrorist-attack-live-blog-dec-18/106155938
Note the anti-Semitism envoy( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jillian_Segal ) is a rather problematic individual with extremely pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian views.
^Sobit of a worry that this willbe use dto silecne and furtehr harm the Palestinian and Muslim Australian communitie sand furtehr limit the rights to protest and free speeech here.
God Awful Movies!
GAM 536 Hanukkah on Rye
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=UOT1CInUXrg
Clarity fix : ^So bit of a worry that this will be used to silence and further harm the Palestinian-Australian and Muslim Australian communities and further limit the rights to protest and free speeech here.
Satellites That Scoop Air And Use It As Propellant
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lz4O6AzLofQ
Anton Petrov
“Bizarre Connection Between Milankovitch Cycles, Mars and Volcanoes”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=1ShYlcDSXTQ
Not that new as “news” & forget if I’ve mentioned before but still :
Source : https://www.vice.com/en/article/pauline-hansons-one-nation-has-been-declared-a-hate-group/
RFK Jr. is paying hack antivaxx researchers to kill babies with placebo vaccines in a trial where they stupidly hope it’ll be the babies who get real vaccines that die.
Elizabeth Jacobs (Epidemiologist):
Gavin Yamey (Global health prof):
Journal Vaccine – What is actually the emerging evidence about non-specific vaccine effects in randomized trials from the Bandim Health Project? (paywalled)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264410X25012344Elizabeth Jacobs: “Holy shit. I do not have confirmation that it’s Benn’s group but all signs point in that direction.”
Rando 1: “Given she has written specifically about ‘NSEs’ regarding children in precisely this country, I would be surprised if somehow there was a second vaccine-denying Dutch group interested in experimenting on children in Guinea-Bissau.”
Rando 2: “In Guinea-Bissau? The country has just had a coup d’etat. This is insane.”
Rando 3: “Stabell Benn and her husband Peter Aaby run the Bandim Health Project.”
Charlotte Strøm, at Sensible Medicine:
^ Rando 3: “The article is good. It just sucks that one of the two principals who run the site is an anti-vaccine nut (Mandrola) and the other, Cifu, who will mouth pro-vaccine stances, when asked, just enables it all.”
Rebecca Fielding-Miller (Epidemiologist): “This is just Tuskegee levels of malfeasance. Like the example you would put on a public health ethics 101 training and then scrap it because it’s too obvious.”
MarkH (Trauma surgeon): “Worse than Tuskegee because at least at the start of that trial there wasn’t already an effective therapy. Hits all the other marks though—single blind, on a vulnerable population, white investigators, black patients etc. Just a big ol racist boondoggle.”
Ferric Fang (Infectious disease spec): “My understanding is that when federal funds are used for a clinical trial conducted outside the US, researchers must comply with US human subjects protections, and the relevant IRB must obtain an assurance of compliance with ethical standards set by the US Office for Human Research Protections.”
Elizabeth Jacobs: “Normally that would be true. But RFK Jr. can do whatever he wants.”
Elizabeth Jacobs: “I would absolutely imagine [Denmark would be solid on medical ethics], which is why this is puzzling.”
Rando 4: “Awarding funds does not mean the study has received necessary ethical approvals. typically, preparing/submitting the IRB/PRA package is a funded task in the contract. I have had projects that failed to pass PRA clearance and the govt terminates the contract early and de-obligates remaining funds. So best case scenario RFK jr is wasting taxpayer $$ paying researchers to design a doomed study that will never make it out of ethics review.“
Soem real Comet ATLAS the interstellar one news here via space dot com
Source : https://www.space.com/news/live/interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-closest-to-earth-flyby-week-dec-17-2025
Sentences there are hypertext links or at least contain them.
More commentary on 21.
Rando 1 (Microbiologist):
Gavin Chait (Data scientist): “Oh, it’s against a lot of laws. Think laws arising out of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, codified in UN statute, and in EU and US law. I’m hoping someone sues the clinical research team before this gets started.”
Rando 2: “As he cut every single medical research grant in the United States.”
Rando 3: “We can’t work with foreign collaborators, but they can send money to a foreign PI to conduct an ethically questionable study in a vulnerable population in another foreign country? This is what corruption looks like.”
Some good news from Britain
.https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1Giwg9jAdP/
The Guardian refers to DJT;s TV address as the “Bah! Humbug!” address.
Reddington from The Blackist negotiating.
“There’s Nothing More Depressing Than A Failed Communist State”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/e_siNMt_a0I
Seth Meyers:
“Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles Stuns Washington with Explosive Vanity Fair Comments”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=7bAk40DKntk
Britain;
“MORE NIGEL FARAGE SCANDAL As (Supposedly) Nigel Broke Electoral Law During Clacton Campaign”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=NUd7AJmmArQ
The bloke who sang Hitler Youth songs in school and joined a far-right group as a young man is facing even more questions.
CNN: Trump’s social media business is merging with a nuclear fusion company
Trump Media is not a winning business on it’s own, what little value it has mostly comes from all the people that want to keep an eye on Trump’s feed. It’s diversifying by investing in a random slew of fields that happen to be hot and filled with lots of bad transactions such as crypto and AI. I expect TAE is hoping to bypass inspections, legal requirements and pesky details like environmental regulation by hooking up with Trump directly.
The top 10 most brazen lies from Trump’s year-end prime-time address
“That the president felt compelled to lie incessantly through his speech says volumes about how awful the year has been.”
Related video at the link.
Clearly, the aliens sent it because they want to see the Epstein files!
Sky Captain @21, that scheme is worse than anything I thought RFK Jr. could or would do. Let’s hope that concerned people all over the planet protest.
Trump’s latest White House ‘renovations’ take a turn toward vandalism
The “Presidential Walk of Fame” was already a tacky mess, and one report suggests it’s now “even more stunningly stupid.”
Followup to comment 8.
The Destruction: NCAR Edition
Same link as in comment 34.
Same link as in comment 34.
Washington Post link
“The Vanity Fair photographer who disrupted Trumpworld’s polished image”
“Every line, spot, blemish and blood vessel was captured by Christopher Anderson’s lens.”
More at the links, including the startling closeups. The most revealing photos can be viewed at the Washington Post link.
Followup to comment 30.
Link
Video at the link.
The Hill – What to know about Trump’s $1,776 ‘warrior dividend’ to service members
Commentary
Homeland Security helps Trump donor make bank on deportation scheme
Link
Yes, even more banners than we’ve seen before. Photo at the link.
The report covers other evidence of Trump’s vanity, including national park passes, Trump’s “Gold card,” and a new $1 coin.
Followup to comments 30, 38 and 39.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/white-house-dementia-care-unit-lets
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3ma7kr5oa5d2c
Video at the link.
Jay Willis (Balls & Strikes)
Patrick McNeil (Civil/human rights advocate):
Courtney Bublé (Law360):
From the recap: “In many ways, Olson is typical of the ambitious lawyers the Trump administration has been nominating […] Olson described himself as a ‘specialist’ in litigating a very particular type of Title IX case: those designed to bar transgender athletes from competing in college sports.”
Rando: “Genuine question: Is there any chance Kennedy votes against a Trump nominee? Is it even conceivable that he does anything other than harrumph, express concerns, and vote yes?”
Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center board votes to rename it as the ‘Trump-Kennedy Center’
“The board’s decision to add Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center could face legal hurdles, as the law creating the center prohibits renaming the building.”
Trump flubs what ‘separation of church and state’ means in targeting Raphael Warnock
“Mr. President, my faith is not a weapon, it’s a bridge, and I invite you to Bible study,” the Georgia Democrat replied.
Link
NBC News:
Commentary:
Link
Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, refused to let Jack Smith testify in a public hearing.
Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, commenting on a House vote on a bill extending enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years:
Trump’s ‘warrior dividends’ will use funding for military housing subsidies
Southpaw
Randos:
Trump is kicking off America’s monthslong birthday bash celebrating the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding
/Full 3-min video at the link.
Washington Post link
“EXCLUSIVE: Stephen Miller’s hard-line Mexico strategy morphed into deadly boat strikes”
“The Trump administration originally planned to go after Mexican drug cartels, but pivoted to Venezuela, according to current and former officials. A trio of legal documents and directives have subsequently authorized an unorthodox lethal campaign.”
More at the link.
Lynna @52 quoting WaPo:
He took the wrong lesson this spring from hearing “They’re not gang members, membership alone wouldn’t be a crime, gangs aren’t a country, and we’re not at war with Venezuela!”
Sky Captain @53, agreed.
In other news: A toppled Christmas tree, tear gas and projectile potatoes: Farmers vent rage at Brussels
“Tractors took over the streets of the European Quarter while EU leaders held a crunch summit.”
Hossenfelder alert
“China Makes Breakthrough With Thorium Nuclear Reactor. Where is the West?”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=mzJyox9A5Fk
MS NOW:
NBC News:
New York Times:
Roll Call:
Good news, even if temporary.
Washington Post:
FFS
Cartoon: Enabler-in-chief
An ‘origami’ airless wheel to explore lunar caves
.https://phys.org/news/2025-12-origami-airless-wheel-explore-lunar.html
Watch how this shape-shifting wheel tackles uneven surfaces
.https://techxplore.com/news/2024-08-shifting-wheel-tackles-uneven-surfaces.html
https://www.wonkette.com/p/bari-weiss-will-capitalize-on-first
“Bari Weiss Will Capitalize On First Loser Town Hall By Doing MORE Loser Town Halls!”
TikTok owner ByteDance signs binding deal to create new U.S. joint venture
“The deal will lead to the U.S. version of TikTok being owned by a majority-American group of investors.”
This is a developing story.
@45 Lynna, OM
Bluesky: Rep. Joyce Beatty
Apparently the only one because Trump has packed the board but it goes to show just how contemptibly cheap this White House is.
I want to know what’s in that review!
Oh well. Glad to hear Democrat leadership has pre-emptively given up on winning the 2028 elections, and have instead opted for the strategy of stuffing StevoR-brand ear plugs in their heads and screaming: “La la la la la la!”.
Follow-up to Lynna @56.
NBC – Suspect in Brown, MIT professor shootings found dead in NH
Among the live updates below the article:
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) will set up the conditions that resulted in the fatal collision between an airliner and a Blackhawk helicopter at the Ronald Reagan Airport earlier this year at any airport. The military will bale to conduct training exercises in crowded commercial airspace.
One Year After the DCA Crash, the NTSB Warns We’re Rolling Safety Back
Captain Steeeve says this is “the fox guarding the henhouse”. Head of National Transportation Safety Board Jennifer Homendy is “hopping mad” about this idiocy – I think Captain Steeeve is too.
The US military is greater threat to aviation safety than any terrorist organization. The only thing these idiots learn from their mistakes is how to repeat them.
They obviously haven’t, but of course you’re pleased that you think they have – that’s absolutely no surprise to anyone here.
Some good news about the speech, and about DJT
.https://youtube.com/shorts/7Xo6N5Id2hg
The Democratic party not making an evaluation of what went wrong 2024 is certainly on brand… once again it will be up to the grassroots activists to drag the limp corporate candidates to victory.
(Yes, I know governor Newsom is a centrist Clinton-type politician but unlike the rest of that ilk he has not been mummified)
People who are alone this Xmas. Like “A” who does not even have royal titles anymore.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BLqDx3Z2T/
Right-wing titans clash onstage at AmericaFest, revealing bitter divide in MAGA world
Potential Disaster Averted as Bid to Undermine Judicial Branch Fails
Same link as in comment 73.
Same link as in comment 73.
Same link as in comment 73.
Followup to comments 8 and 34
Another head/desk moment courtesy of Trump’s immigration policies:
Link
Goody bags full of racist propaganda.
Cartoon: Christmas gifts
Kennedy Center already defiled with Trump’s name
More at the link.
Blanche says DOJ won’t release full Epstein files by Friday deadline
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-gives-warfighters-warrior-bonus
“Trump Gives WARFIGHTERS ‘Warrior Bonus’ Checks Stolen From Their Military Housing $$$”
Taking money away from the Military Housing funds is not good. Some military families live in housing infested with roaches, or in housing with leaks that cause black mold to flourish. Other military housing issues include: contaminated water supplies, faulty HVAC and structural problems.
https://www.pogo.org/fact-sheets/fact-sheet-how-housing-conditions-are-failing-military-families
https://www.wonkette.com/p/mamas-dont-let-your-babies-go-to
ROLLING STONE link
“MELISSA HORTMAN DIED IN A SHOCKING ACT OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE. THIS IS THE STORY OF HER LIFE”
“The Minnesota Speaker’s closest friends and family open up for the first time”
Much more at the link.
The Trump admin wants to send NYC’s asylum seekers to Uganda and Beyond
Trump has a new deportation strategy
Rando:
Washington Post link
“A Russian missile, filled with U.S. tech, rips a Ukrainian boy’s life apart”
“Despite export controls, weapons with Western components show up on Ukrainian soil nightly, killing and maiming civilians.”
Much more at the link, including photos.
EU to pay €3B a year in interest for Ukraine loan
“Leaders opted to raise common debt rather than leverage frozen Russian assets to finance the loan.”
Putin taunts NATO’s Rutte: You know the US doesn’t see Russia as an enemy
Link
Related video at the link.
Fox’s spin reaches tornado levels over Trump’s economy
Posted by readers of the article:
Marco Rubio swears he’s very cool and totally popular
Marco Rubio has thoroughly politicized the office of Secretary of State. Also, Rubio has not risen to Trump levels of “most people don’t like you,” but he is getting there. In the video, Rubio is smug.
3I/ATLAS Closest Approach // Rock Giants // New NASA Administrator
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=_P7MmL67vzc
Yikes.
Link
Cartoon: Killing Tiny Tim
Debunking Russian propaganda.
“Russia’s Big Gamble Just Fell Apart – And It’s Bad for Putin”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=wp31HW75YqA
Putin: We have taken Kupjansk.
Zelensky: Has a photo taken of him standing in front of Kupjansk.
Farron Cousins:
“Republicans Admit They’re Tired Of Toddler Trump’s Psycho Behavior”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=AEW3QheHRxE
HuffPo – ICE says U.S. Citizen’s birth certificate is fake after arresting her
Rando: “ICE really should have realized that no actual Mexicans would go to Taco Bell.”
Ternary Computing: Theoretically Better than Binary
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=sWKyrAXxzGA
In the 1966 German science fiction TV series Raumpatrouille the aliens were indeed using ternary computing (You did not see it because Star Trek had started three weeks previously).
“Westerly jet stream emerges as key driver of mid-latitude hydroclimatic extremes”
Warmer Arctic region makes jet stream ‘wavier’ making precipitation in the South more chaotic.
.https://phys.org/news/2025-12-westerly-jet-stream-emerges-key.html
A 400-million-year-old fossil is revealing how plants grew into giants
https://phys.org/news/2025-12-million-year-fossil-revealing-grew.html
This intermediate vascular system 400 million years ago allowed plants to grow up to 20 cm – a huge leap from the millimeter-sized plants that came before them.
How much does it cost to end rough sleeping? An Australian-first study may have just found out.
(Also, Finland is doing the right thing)
.https://phys.org/news/2025-12-rough-australian.html
Marcy Wheeler (EmptyWheel):
A couple days later.
Ryan Reilly (NBC):
Commentary