I’m going to follow up on two important stories that Dakinikat wrote about yesterday: Trump’s order for the Navy to redesign its warships to resemble those used in WWII, and his uncaring attitude toward sailors who are serving in horrible conditions on the USS Lincoln and other warships because of Trump’s Iran war. Then I’ll move on to other news.
The U.S. Navy is considering a major redesign of its new aircraft carriers to better match President Donald Trump’s preferred aesthetic for the warships, according to seven current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The service isevaluating the feasibility of moving the multistory tower that acts as the carrier’s command center farther forward, toward the middle of the ship, to resemble older vessels, the officials said. The review, which has not been previously reported, is in response to Trump’s concerns about the “look” of the new Ford-class ships, where the tower is near the rear, these people said.
The timing and extent of the Navy’s evaluation is unclear, with current and former officials cautioning that the service was concerned that such a change would require significant time and money. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.
Moving that command center, known as the “island,” would be the second major design change prompted by the president, who on Thursday issued a national security memorandum directing the Navy to develop a plan to revert to older steam-powered catapults on future carriers. The systems help launch jets off the ships’ flight decks.
Trump’s preference, current and former officials said, is for the new aircraft carriers to look more like those that were in service during World War II.
The Navy also examined the issue during his first term as president, said a former senior U.S. official. A study found that moving the island could cost billions of dollars in redesign costs and significantly delay the program, this person said.
“It came back that the cost and time to do so would just be extraordinary,” the former official said.
You can read more details using the gift link above.
Cat and kittens, 19th Century American, National Gallery of Art
Trump is obsessed with appearances. These demands for changes in the warships are crazy. He spends even more time obsessing about his ballroom. It really is time for the 25th Amendment, if only we had responsible people in the cabinet.
The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran, destroyed much of the base. And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.
The Navy needed a Plan B to continue feeding the sailors working around the clock to keep warplanes flying strike missions, and later to maintain a blockade of Iran’s ports.
With the threat of Iranian attacks at other ports in the region, the Pentagon looked to a base under British command on the island of Diego Garcia as its supply hub, which is south of the Maldives and roughly 2,200 miles from where two aircraft carrier strike groups have been operating in the Gulf of Oman.
The loss of the hub in Bahrain has contributed to a host of reported problems on carriers supporting operations against Iran, as Democratic senators raise concerns about the Lincoln’s 5,000 sailors and their nearly nine-month deployment.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the reported problems included shortages of basic supplies and the deteriorating mental health of its crew members.
Again, you can read more with the gift link. Both Trump and Hegseth have dismissed the problems sailors are facing and the concerns of their families, but they actually have moved to relieve the USS Lincoln and replace it with the USS George Washington, recently stationed near Japan and currently near Indonesia.
A U.S. official told ABC News on Thursday that the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, which is homeported in Japan, will replace the Lincoln as part of a long-planned rotation of ships and has begun heading toward the Middle East.
By Daniel Merlin (French artist)
The aircraft carrier’s movements come amid reports of mental health and supply issues aboard the USS Lincoln, whose long deployment to the Middle East in support of the Iran war includes a record-setting time at sea of more than 200 days. Navy leaders, including the Navy’s acting Secretary Hung Cao, last week held a heated town hall for families of the USS Lincoln who had raised concerns about the conditions on the ship.
When a reporter on Friday said that family members of people aboard that ship are concerned about the conditions, Trump interjected to suggest that they are “not” actually worried.
“No, they’re not. That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another very similar ship,” Trump said.
When pressed by a reporter about whether the deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln has gone on for too long, Trump said not that it hasn’t gone on “nearly long enough.”
“No, no, not nearly long enough,” Trump said.
Family members can’t be happy to read those quotes. We’ve known for a long time that Trump couldn’t care less about our troops, but to see it spelled out in print is still shocking.
It is among the most famous phrases in presidential history: “ The buck stops here.” Except with President Donald Trump, it almost never does.
Concerns about a weak economy and still-high inflation? His predecessor, Joe Biden, saddled him with that, he says, even though the Democrat has been out of office for 18-plus months and despite Trump once promising an immediate turnaround.
The increasingly unpopular war in Iran that has kept oil prices high, Trump’s approval rating low and sent shock waves through the global economy? Actually, this was Trump making up for timid earlier presidents who, he argues, squandered nearly 50 years of opportunities to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Trump’s tendency to point fingers at others is increasingly in the spotlight before November’s midterm elections, when Republicans are trying to retain control of Congress. His unwillingness to accept blame sometimes leads him to deny that there are problems at all, and could leave GOP leaders in tight races with little reassurance for voters that their concerns are being addressed.
A bit more:
Accepting the 2016 presidential nomination, Trump said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” But as president, he has often suggested that the solution and blame rest elsewhere.
“The buck stops with everybody,” Trump said in 2019, during a lengthy government shutdown. In 2020, on the same day he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for a lack of COVID-19 testing….
The president acknowledged in a recent Punchbowl interview that voters are angry, but he said they are not mad at him but at congressional Republicans.
Trump believes his party can hold its congressional majorities after November, but he was clear that if Republicans lose, it won’t be his fault — echoing his comments before the 2018 midterms that he would not accept blame if his party lost control of the House, which it did.
There’s even more at the link. I’m glad at least one journalist is writing about this.
President Donald Trump is heading to another weekend at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club as questions mount over promises he made to Americans on energy costs and his pledge to take care of the U.S. military. Trump campaigned on cutting energy and electricity prices in half within his first year in office and repeatedly promised Americans $2 gasoline.
However, energy costs have not fallen anywhere close to those levels and gasoline prices remain well above the $2 target. Many are experiencing some of the highest electricity bills they have ever seen.
At the same time, thousands of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have reportedly endured food and water shortages, disrupted mail, long workdays, plumbing problems and deteriorating mental health after more than 250 days at sea. Against that backdrop, Trump is once again retreating to Bedminster for a weekend that is largely closed to the press.
Trump doesn’t seem to do much of anything other than sit in oval office talking to reporters and falling asleep and then playing golf at every opportunity.
In a speech last night, a delusional Trump claimed he could make the Strait of Hormuz “a territory of the United States.” Again, it’s 25th Amendment time.
President Trump claimed during remarks on Long Island, N.Y., on Friday that he will make the Strait of Hormuz a U.S. territory, despite the fact that Oman and Iran share jurisdiction of the waterway.
“Pretty soon, I will be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States,” Trump said during an address highlighting his administration’s efforts to combat crime in the U.S.
Trump did not elaborate on how he would make the critical shipping lane a U.S. territory, considering the U.S. does not have jurisdiction over the waterway….
Trump has said since the conflict started roughly six months ago that the U.S. has controlled the strait. He deployed a U.S. naval blockade in the strait twice, claiming U.S. supremacy over the transit of oil exports from the region.
Iran has pushed back on Trump’s claims that the U.S. controls the waterway. In a post on the social platform X on Wednesday, Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority said that whoever owns it does “not change the reality: the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked and will not be reopened until Iran’s conditions are accepted.”
I can’t find any good news this morning–what else is new? The “president” is dangerously demented, his cabinet is full of kooks, his economy is going down the tubes, and he seems determined to start a war in Venezuela. Anyway, here are the stories that caught my attention today.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraftfollowed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any ofthe men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
Use the gift link to read the rest. We’re going to need prosecutions if we ever get rid of Trump and his goons.
U.S Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is lashing out at a report that he ordered military officials to “kill them all” during one of the Trump administration’s strikes in the Caribbean aimed a boat allegedly carrying drug cargo.
Nataliya Bagatskaya, Echo of the black cats
“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” Hegseth, 45, said in a Nov. 28 post on X.
The defense secretary was responding to a Washington Post story citing two anonymous sources that claimed he ordered troops to leave no survivors after a missile struck the vessel, which was traveling off the Trinidad coast, as two individuals were clinging to the smoldering wreckage.
Since September, the Trump administration has attacked at least 21 boats traversing international waters, killing 83 people. Trump and other officials defend the boat strikes as an attempt to crackdown on illegal narcotics flooding into the U.S., but lawmakers from both parties have criticized the administration for providing no intelligence briefings or other evidence about what the vessels are carrying.
“At this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said during an Oct. 26 appearance on Fox News Sunday. “This is akin to what China does, what Iran does with drug dealers − they summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it’s wrong.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who shared the story about Hegseth’s alleged order, raised similar concerns about the constitutionality of the strikes in an Nov. 28 post on X.
“If you want to know why Hegseth is panicking about reminders that there is accountably for giving or carrying out illegal orders, it’s likely because he knows he has given illegal orders to murder people,” Murphy said.
The head of the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee has pledged “vigorous oversight” after a Washington Post report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members during the first U.S. strike against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean earlier this year.
A live drone feed showed two survivors from the original crew of 11 clinging to the wreckage of their boat following the initial missile attack on Sept. 2, The Post reported on Friday afternoon. The Special Operations commander overseeing the operation then ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation, killing both survivors. Those people, along with five others in the original report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the committee’s ranking Democrat, issued a statement saying that the committee “is aware of recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels.”
The committee, they said, “has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
If Trump is so concerned about drugs coming into the U.S. from Latin America, why did he just pardon a Honduran drug kingpin?
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
By Louis Valtat
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. And prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine.
The prosecution stretched across Mr. Trump’s first term and concluded during Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s time as president. In the end, Mr. Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison in Federal District Court in Manhattan, capping what prosecutors had presented as a sprawling conspiracy.
Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the same agency, also reacted with disbelief to the news of the pardon. Mr. Vigil said the move imperiled the reputation of the United States and its international investigations into drug trafficking.
“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,” Mr. Vigil said on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s vow to pardon such a high-profile convicted drug trafficker appeared to contradict the president’s campaign to unleash the might of the American military on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that his administration says, without evidence, are involved in drug trafficking. That campaign has so far killed more than 80 people since it began in September.
President Donald Trump told airlines to consider Venezuela’s airspace closed, days after he vowed to take action on land “very soon.”
Following dozens of strikes against alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed more than 80 people since September, Trump suggested to military service members in a Thanksgiving Day phone call that the U.S. would soon take action “on land.”
On Saturday, he urged the clearing of the airspace near the South American country. “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” the U.S. president wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning.
Over the weekend, the Federal Aviation Administration also warned airlines to “exercise caution” when flying over Venezuela “due to the worsening security situation and heightened military activity.”
Several airlines cancelled their flights as a result of the FAA’s warning.
By Salah Hefney
Can he do that? A bit more from the Independent story:
Last week, the White House was reportedly considering having U.S. military planes drop leaflets — containing details about the $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Nicolás Maduro — over Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, the Washington Postreported.
For months, the U.S. government has been building up a military presence in the region to curb what Trump administration officials call “narco-terrorists” and has also made it clear it wants to oust Maduro.
Maduro has been in power since 2013, following the death of Hugo Chavez. The U.S. is among more than 50 countries that have refused to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s head of state, claiming he lost the 2024 presidential election. The State Department has offered rewards for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan president since 2020; the Trump administration raised the reward to $50 million this year.
The U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which Trump alleges are fueled by Maduro’s government. Last month, the State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” claiming it’s headed by Maduro and other high-ranking members of his “illegitimate” regime.
National Guard troops patrolling in D.C. will be paired with local law enforcement personnel, at least temporarily, in the wake of the Wednesday attack that killed one National Guard member and critically injured another, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post and two D.C. police officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning that is still in progress.
“Officers will conduct high-visibility patrols with the National Guard and provide assistance as needed,” said the email, which was sent to D.C. police leadership Wednesday evening. The email said the situation was “fluid,” and adjustments to the staffing plan could be made in the coming days.
Fabrice Backès, Sandie
If enacted on a long-term basis, the change would significantly shift the way National Guard troops have worked with local and federal law enforcement in the District since their arrival in August. Trump administration officials have credited the troops for helping reduce crime in the city — in part, they argued, because the troops’ presence at Metro stations and on National Park Service lands frees up law enforcement to police other areas of the city. Diverting local police to accompany Guard members would do essentially the opposite by siphoning them from other tasks in D.C. neighborhoods.
The email said the new pairing would start Thursday and Friday.A D.C. police official said some officers had been temporarily detailed to accompany the troops, and a more long-term policy change was under discussion.
The official, who stressed that the discussions were still preliminary, said D.C. police, Metro Transit Police, U.S. Park Police and several other law enforcement agencies were having conversations with the National Guard task force in D.C. about pairing the troops with police officers while they are on city streets. Since their deployment to D.C., groups of National Guard troops have largely operated unaccompanied by police, the official said.
A judge has already said that putting National Guard Troops in DC was illegal, but Trump filed an “emergency appeal.” Meanwhile, two members of the West Virginia National Guard have been shot. One has died and the other is still in critical condition.
Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of Summersville, W.Va., joined the service in 2023. Beckstrom’s father, Gary, called her his “baby girl” and said she had “passed to glory” in a Facebook post on Thursday.
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey on Friday called for residents to hold a moment of silence for the two victims of the shooting, as both were deployed as part of that state’s National Guard.
Morrisey said in a statement Friday that Beckstrom had made the “ultimate sacrifice” in service to her state and the nation. He added that both Beckstrom and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, had stepped forward and volunteered for the mission in D.C.
Morrisey also said that Wolfe remains in “very critical condition.”
“These two West Virginia heroes were serving our country and protecting our nation’s capital when they were maliciously attacked,” Morrisey said. “Their courage and commitment to duty represent the very best of our state.”
President Donald Trump attacked another female reporter on Thursday after she asked him about the vetting of the suspect in a Washington, D.C., shooting that killed a National Guardsman, calling her a “stupid person.”
CBS News’ chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes questioned Trump about reports that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the alleged gunman who entered the U.S. as part of a Biden-era program for Afghan refugees who fled the nation in 2021, was vetted before he allegedly shot at the National Guardsmen on Wednesday.
By Rebecca Aldernet
Reports indicated that Lakanwal was vetted either through his time working with the CIA in Afghanistan, during the removal process from Afghanistan or during his 2024 asylum application, which the Trump administration approved earlier this year.
Cordes, therefore, asked Trump why he blamed the Biden administration if U.S. officials confirmed vetting of the refugees took place. Trump didn’t enjoy the line of questioning.
“Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” Trump asked. “Because they came into on a plane along with 1000s of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person. And we — there’s a law passed that it’s almost impossible not to get to get them out. You can’t get them out once they come in. And they came in and they were unvetted. They were unchecked. There were many of them, and they came on big planes, and it was disgraceful.”
The attack was the latest in a series of swipes at female reporters. Trump on Wednesday described a New York Times reporter as “ugly, inside and out” over a reported story on his age. He also called a Bloomberg News reporter a “piggy” and an ABC News reporter a “terrible person” for her questioning of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, says one of the reasons the president seems to be increasingly lashing out at female reporters is because he is “rattled.
Mary, 60, discussed the rise in incidents on the Wednesday edition of her show, Mary Trump Live. She noted the 79-year-old president calling a reporter “piggy” while telling her to be quiet during a gaggle aboard Air Force One, and a Truth Social post in which he insulted a New York Times reporter’s looks.
“His misogynistic attacks against reporters in particular are increasing and that means a couple of things,” she explained. “It means that he’s increasingly comfortable lodging such attacks, as he’s been openly misogynistic, as he’s been openly racist and openly Islamophobic and openly anti-immigrant and openly antisemitic. There’s no hiding it anymore.”
”I think it’s also a sign that he’s a little rattled. He’s also never clearly heard of the Streisand effect,” Mary said, referring to the internet phenomenon where somebody inadvertently draws further attention to something while attempting to hide it from the public.
“When you call attention to the thing you want people to ignore, it’s probably a terrible idea.”
I posted about Trump’s conflicts with his architects on Wednesday. This is an extension of that story. After he met with architect James McCreary in August,
McCrery Architects got to work on the initial drawings for the project, sketching out a design with high ceilings and arched windows reminiscent of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. It would have the latest security features, including bulletproof glass. Gold furniture, known to please the president, was added to the renderings.
Black cat with cat lady, Dee Nickerson
It was flashy enough to impress a man of Mr. Trump’s tastes, while largely matching the style of the historic White House without overshadowing it.
That’s when things got tricky.
In offering up his initial design, Mr. McCrery could not have known that Mr. Trump’s vision for the project was growing. What started as a 500-seat ballroom connected to the East Wing grew to 650 seats. Next, he wanted a 999-seat ballroom, then room for 1,350. Even as Mr. Trump assured the public in July that the ballroom would not touch the existing structure, he already had approved plans to demolish the East Wing to make way for something that could hold several thousand people, according to three people familiar with the timeline.
The latest plan, which officials said was still preliminary, calls for a ballroom much larger than the West Wing and the Executive Mansion. Mr. Trump has said publicly that he would like a ballroom big enough to hold a crowd for a presidential inauguration.
The size of the project was not the only issue raising alarms. Mr. Trump also told people working on the ballroom that they did not need to follow permitting, zoning or code requirements because the structure is on White House grounds, according to three people familiar with his comments. (The firms involved have insisted on following industry standards.)
In recent weeks, Mr. McCrery has pulled back from day-to-day involvement in the project, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. They emphasized that Mr. McCrery was still involved as a consultant on the design and proud to be working for Mr. Trump.
Trump has destroyed our government; now he’s working on destroying the White House. Use the gift link to read the whole awful story.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What do you think?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
jjlo
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments