“The ultimate photo defining the trump presidency deserves the cartoon that ultimately defines the trump presidency. Thank you in advance for all the accolades. Dozing Don has a bad dream.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Yesterday, the foul-mouthed nickname guy who initiated the slur “Sleepy Joe Biden” spent most of a televised meeting sound asleep. This wasn’t just the usual work meeting where it’s easy to fall asleep listening to the droning tones of your CEO try to explain something that he never fully understood no matter how much data and explanations you gave him when you prepped him through the least technical stuff you had to do to show him the company was going underwater and your next assignment will be explaining it to some Republican Congressional aid so he can beg Congress for some form of bail-out. Oops, sorry, jumped back to me around 1980, didn’t really mean to.
This particular meeting of Big Pharma CEOS included a dramatic medical emergency. Donnie Dotard stood up and just stood there while a few others rushed to examine the fallen. The Secretary of Health and Human Services made a quick break for the door. Finally, a staffer thought about ushering the media out the door. Hopefully, with all that tacky signage and gold gee-gaws, they figured their way out of the Oval Office.
Reporters who witnessed the incident first-hand said Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator for Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, helped the executive to the ground, preventing the man from hitting his head. As reporters were ushered out of the Oval Office, Cabinet members attended to the man, elevating his legs.
Okay, I’m too cheeky today, so fuck all that. Let’s see what Stephen Colbert had to say last night, as reported by TV Insider. “Colbert Gives Verdict on Trump’s Reaction After Man Collapses in Oval Office.”
On Thursday’s Late Show, Colbert aired a clip of the scary moment, in which the man collapsed at the start of Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks’ speech. While several people rushed to help the man, including Dr. Mehmet Oz, the President rose from his desk and stood by nonchalantly.
“As I said, the fella’s okay, but I’m sure that was scary,” Colbert said. “But thankfully, the room was full of exactly who you want in a medical emergency: pharmaceutical executives. ‘Quick! Quick! Someone maximize shareholder value!’”
The late-night host reiterated that the man was “okay” and praised the quick action of everybody who rushed to help him.
“Well, almost everybody,” he added. “Because this photo’s been going around. Take a look at this photo, this viral photo from after the fainting. Look at that.”
Colbert showed a photo that has been making the rounds on social media, featuring Trump standing at his desk looking vacantly ahead as several people attend to the man in the background.
“They’ve got his legs up and everything!” Colbert stated. “That picture is worth a thousand words… none of which I can say on CBS.”
We’re beginning to see some analysis of the voting numbers and outcomes analyzed by political data specialists. Heather Cox Richardson has a good piece on some of that at her SubStack Letters from an American.
“None of this is complicated,” political data specialist Tom Bonier wrote yesterday about Tuesday’s dramatic Democratic victories around the country. “The [Republicans] ran on affordability in 2024. They gave sanctimonious lectures on cable news on election night about how the ‘silent working class majority’ had spoken. Then they governed as reckless authoritarians, punishing the working class.”
For nine months now, officials in the Trump administration have pushed their extremist policies with the insistence that his election gave him a mandate, although more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024 than voted for him. Tuesday’s elections stripped away that veneer to reveal just how unpopular their policies really are.
Aside from the health of the country, this poses a dramatic political problem for the Republicans. The midterm elections are in slightly less than a year, and Tuesday’s vote, which suggests the 2024 MAGA coalition has crumbled, may spell bad news for the mid-decade gerrymandering Republicans have pushed in states they control, like Texas. Republican lawmakers created the new Republican-leaning districts by moving Republican voters into Democratic-leaning districts, thus weakening formerly safe Republican districts. That could backfire in a blue-wave election.
First thing Wednesday morning, on the day the government shutdown became the longest shutdown in history, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote to President Donald J. Trump to “demand a bipartisan meeting of legislative leaders to end the [Republican] shutdown of the federal government and decisively address the Republican healthcare crisis.” They assured him that “Democrats stand ready to meet with you face to face, anytime and anyplace,” and concluded: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Trump had a different approach to Tuesday’s news. He met with Republican senators before the cameras and admitted that the shutdown had badly hurt the Republicans. But rather than moving to compromise—as all previous presidents have done to end shutdowns—he reiterated his crusade to make sure Democrats can never again hold power. He demanded that Republican senators end the filibuster and, as soon as they do, promptly end mail-in voting and require prohibitive voter ID. “If we do what I’m saying,” he told the senators, Democrats will “most likely never obtain power because we will have passed every single thing that you can imagine.”
Former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stopped Bloomberg News Senate reporter Steven Dennis in the hallway to say: “We’re not going to do that.”
The results in the states were not as cheery as they could’ve been. This was especially true for ballot initiatives. This is from Bolts Magazineas reported by Alex Burness. “Five Ways Tuesday’s Results Will Affect Voting Rules and Democracy. From felony disenfranchisement and mail voting to mid-decade gerrymanders, Tuesday delivered verdicts on election law across these five states.”
On Tuesday, mostly in the shadow of the Democratic Party’s headlining triumphs, were a series of state and local elections that carried high stakes for election law and voting rights.
Conservatives failed to restrict mail-in voting in a state key to next year’s battle for the U.S. Senate. Voters in two states boosted Democrats’ mid-decade redistricting aspirations. And voters made sure that a plan to unwind one of the nation’s harshest felony disenfranchisement schemes can proceed.
Here, we tour these results, and some others, from five states where the rules of elections were most prominently on the line—California, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
We’ve heard a lot about candidates, but it’s essential to read this information and consider what else was at stake.
President Donald Trump ’s administration asked a federal appeals court Friday to block a judge’s order that it distribute November’s full monthly SNAP food benefits amid a U.S. government shutdown, even as at least some states said they were moving quickly to get the money to people.
The judge gave the Trump administration until Friday to make the payments through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But the administration asked the appeals court to suspend any court orders requiring it to spend more money than is available in a contingency fund, and instead allow it to continue with planned partial SNAP payments for the month.
The court filing came even as the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a memo to states that it’s working to make funds available Friday for full monthly SNAP benefits.
California and Wisconsin said some SNAP recipients already received their full November payments overnight on Thursday.
“Food benefits are now beginning to flow back to California families,” Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. A spokesperson for Democratic Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin also confirmed that full SNAP payments had gone through.
Forbes reveals that the Trump Family’s Grift is still strong and growing. “Trump Wine Hits Government Shelves. This is reported by Zach Everson.
Topline
The Trump Organization’s second-term push to monetize Donald Trump’s presidency has reached the aisles of military exchanges, as Coast Guard-run stores, which provide service members and their families with access to tax-free consumer goods, have stocked Trump-branded wine and cider.
Key Facts
Coast Guard Exchanges at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in Centreville, Virginia, recently stocked Trump-branded wine and cider, according to a photo posted on Instagram and confirmed by Forbes from calls to the stores.
Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin confirmed the exchanges were carrying Trump wines in a statement to Forbes, saying, “The brave men and women of the USCG are pleased to be able to buy Trump wine and cider tax free.”
While there’s been no shortage of Trump’s businesses capitalizing on the presidency—from using the presidential seal on golf markers at his courses to selling a $75 coffee table book showcasing pictures by his official White House photographer—these wines are among the few times Trump products have been sold at a government facility.
The White House referred inquiries to the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard deferred to DHS and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.
Representatives from the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had this to say.
“This is one of those things where there probably isn’t any legal issue, but there is an optics and an ethics issue,” said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog.
It’s just one scam after another with this group. Jacqueline Sweet writes this at her SubStack Disaster Girl. “FBI Informant Who Lied About Bidens Quietly Released From Jail Sparking Trump Pardon Fears. Alexander Smirnov was quietly furloughed from prison months ago.” For a guy obsessed with crime and criminals, he sure puts a lot of them back on the street.
An FBI informant convicted of lying to the Bureau about a fake bribery scheme involving the Bidens has been quietly released from prison just months into a six-year sentence—raising concern he could be pardoned by Donald Trump any moment.
Alexander Smirnov, who has multiple business ties to Trumpworld, was sentenced on January 8, days before Trump became president. He had pleaded guilty to fabricating a story that former President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, had received millions in bribes from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, as well as to a $2 million-plus tax evasion offense.
Yet despite Smirnov being judged a flight risk, with ties to Russian intelligence and foreign assets, the U.S.-Israeli citizen has been mysteriously missing from prison for at least the past four months, Disaster Girl can reveal. Following reports in April that the Trump administration was reviewing the case, concerns have now arisen that the president is considering an imminent pardon.
Smirnov had been serving his sentence at FCI Terminal Island, a low-security prison in Los Angeles. He is still listed at FCI Terminal Island on the Bureau of Prisons website, with a release date of February 2029. But while no filings on the docket for his appeal indicate how or why his release was ordered, he has not been there since at least July.
His absence became apparent when a process server attempted to serve Smirnov with papers for a civil lawsuit related to Smirnov’s time working as a confidential informant for the FBI on a securities fraud case involving California man Andrew Hackett. The process server hired by Hackett told Hackett he had been unable to locate Smirnov at Terminal Island. The prison confirmed to the process server that Smirnov is on “furlough,” according to emails and court filings reviewed by Disaster Girl
The server said that the person responsible for processing service at Terminal Island FCI had “confirmed that Alexander Smirnov is affiliated with the facility, but is not currently housed there,” but that they had declined to provide his current location or any further details. “I was advised to call back in approximately 15 days, as [Smirnov] may or may not return to the facility by that time. The representative was notably guarded and provided minimal information beyond that,” an email from the server to Hackett states.
By October, after repeated attempts to locate Smirnov at the prison, Hackett finally received an answer from the local Sheriff’s Department, which said: “They’ve confirmed that Mr. Smirnov has been furloughed, but no forwarding or new address has been provided.”
Trump’s lies are still making Broadcast news. This is from NBC News. “Trump touts cost of Walmart’s Thanksgiving meal to vindicate his policies — ignoring a key detail. Since Tuesday’s elections, Trump has repeatedly boasted that Walmart’s Thanksgiving meal bundle is cheaper than it was under President Joe Biden. But there’s also less food in it.”
In the wake of Republicans’ heavy election losses on Tuesday, President Donald Trump has responded to voters’ growing concerns by insisting the economy is actually experiencing a “golden age.”
As tangible proof, he has pointed to the cost of Walmart’s Thanksgiving meal bundle, which is roughly 25% less expensive this year than it was last year.
“Grocery prices are way down, and Walmart just announced that the cost of their standard Thanksgiving meal — this is the greatest, their greatest,” Trump said in a speech to the American Business Forum on Wednesday, adding: “It is 25% lower than one year ago. That’s a big deal.”
This year’s package, at less than $40, contains 23 items; last year, there were 29. The missing items this year include onions, celery, sweet potatoes, chicken broth, poultry seasoning, muffin mix, marshmallows, whipped topping and pecan pie.
This year’s meal comes with standard dinner rolls and fresh cranberries, which both currently cost less at Walmart than the sweet Hawaiian rolls and cranberry sauce in last year’s edition.
The 2025 meal also includes just one can of cream of mushroom soup, down from two in 2024.
Walmart did make some additions to its new package, including a twin pack of turkey stuffing, baby carrots and three boxes of macaroni and cheese. Last year, Walmart included ingredients to make stuffing from scratch.
I’m eager to see the Black Friday sales numbers. The only thing booming in the economy is AI-related stocks. They are bubblelicious. And the news and demand for the Epstein files just keeps on building. This is from The New Republic. “DOJ Admits to Republicans That Epstein Files Are Even Worse for Trump. Details in the files are reportedly even more damning for Donald Trump than previously indicated—and it was already bad.” Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling has the byline.
Rumors about Donald Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein have gripped the Republican Party.
A few conservative representatives with ties to the FBI and the Justice Department have spilled that the true details of the Epstein files are “worse” for Trump than previously reported, according to journalist David Schuster.
Michael Wolff, a longtime chronicler of Trump’s White House who conducted extensive interviews with Epstein prior to his death, told The Daily Beast last month that Epstein had shown him photos of Trump with half-naked “young girls” in his lap.
These rumors have galvanized into a legitimate movement among Republicans, who are now, Schuster wrote on X Wednesday night, clamoring for the files’ full release.
For months, just four Republicans had penned their signatures on a discharge petition demanding transparency into the investigation of the pedophilic sex trafficker and his potential associates. Those conservative lawmakers include Representatives Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert.
Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won the special election in Arizona in September, has also vowed to sign the bipartisan petition. She’s the last signature that the House needs to force a vote on the issue—and Speaker Mike Johnson has conveniently refused to swear her in for more than a month.
But the disturbing new rumor has dredged up far more support, with “more than 100 Republicans” planning to vote alongside Democrats in an effort to “get in front of what’s coming,” reported Schuster.
The Trump administration has failed at every turn to mitigate anxieties about the president’s longtime friendship with the child sex criminal. The typically bombastic Attorney General Pam Bondi was silent when asked about the photos during a Senate hearing last month, a choice that further “spooked” several GOP lawmakers, with many interpreting her nonresponse as a very vocal “yes.”
Karma can be a bitch after all. Here are a few other suggestions as a close-out to this post.
Trump holds forth at his Mar-a-Lago press conference.
Trump isn’t in office yet, but he is already dominating the news. It’s difficult to believe, but I think he is actually getting crazier.
Trump 2.0 is going to be chaos to the nth degree. I have no doubt that it will make his first term look sane by comparison. He is aging noticeably–he’s approaching 80–and his dementia is getting worse.
As we all know, this time there won’t be sane handlers trying to hold back his worst inclinations; he will be surrounded by MAGA loyalists who will do whatever he wants. It’s going to be awful, and getting through what’s coming is going to be tough.
Again, he’s not even waiting until he’s sworn in to begin causing trouble. Yesterday he held a “press conference” during which he came off as truly psychotic. In case you missed it (I couldn’t bear to watch), here are some media write-ups.
David E. Sanger at The New York Times: Dripping Faucets and Seizing Greenland: Trump Is Back and Chaos Ensues.
There was talk of the rising number of beached whales in Massachusetts, the victim, the president-elect said, of those windmills that have been erected off the coast. They “are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”
There was a vow to rename the Gulf of Mexico, by presidential decree, to the “Gulf of America.” And then there was Donald J. Trump’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the 51-mile Panama Canal on national security grounds, along with the 836,000 square miles of Greenland, the world’s largest island.
Mr. Trump’s family and supporters like to say “We are so back!” and they are, without doubt. Yet as the man who will be president again spun out threats and angry denouncements of the Biden administration and personal grievances for more than an hour on Tuesday in the living room of his Mar-a-Lago club, something else was back: the chaotic stream-of-consciousness presidency.
Mr. Trump has returned to our daily national cognizance, even though one could argue he never really left. Tuesday’s news conference was a reminder of what that was like, and what the next four years may have in store.
He waxed on about a favorite complaint during his first term: Shower heads and sink faucets that don’t deliver water, a symbol of a regulatory state gone mad. “It goes drip, drip, drip,” he said. “People just take longer showers, or run their dishwasher again,” and “they end up using more water.”
Then he moved on to the prospect of a military clash with Denmark. After refusing to rule out the prospect of coercing a NATO ally with the use of force if it remained reluctant to turn over property the president-elect coveted, Mr. Trump suggested that Denmark had a dubious claim on Greenland anyway.
Don Jr. and his buddies in Greenland yesterday
“People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up, because we need it for national security,” he said.
As for Panama, he insisted the United States had to defend against an urgent national security threat from China, though the situation around the canal was little changed from the last time Mr. Trump sat in the Oval Office.
“It might be that you’ll have to do something,” he said with signature vagueness, when asked about his suggestion that the only solution to this problem may be military force.
There was a lot of déjà vu in Tuesday’s news conference, recalling scenes from his first presidency. The conspiracy theories, the made-up facts, the burning grievances — all despite the fact that he has pulled off one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history. The vague references to “people” whom he never names. The flat declaration that American national security was threatened now, without defining how the strategic environment has changed in a way that could prompt him to violate the sovereignty of independent nations.
But there were also several differences in this version of Mr. Trump that are easy to overlook in a man who can move, in an instant, from the failures of American plumbing to the need to revive the territory-grabbing spirit of President William McKinley.
President Trump has created a massive gulf in America.
No, I am not talking about the half baked promise “to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America” that Trump announced in his news conference on Tuesday. The gulf that our country actually is going to have is the one between our current reality and the one we will be experiencing when Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
This news conference, which was the first since Trump’s re-election was certified by Congress, was a wild one — even by Trumpian standards. In a little over an hour behind a podium at his Mar-a-Lago beach club, the president-elect, along with promising to rename an ocean basin, threatened potential military force against Panama and Denmark. He also suggested he might use “economic force” to make Canada the 51st State.
“They should be a state,” Trump said of one of America’s closest neighbors and allies.
And, if Hamas doesn’t release the remaining hostages taken in the October 7th attack before Trump’s inauguration, Trump vowed that would also result in a massive show of force.
“If they’re not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East,” Trump said. “It will not be good for Hamas and it will not be good frankly for anyone. All hell will break out.”
Trump’s feverish foreign policy visions were mixed up with his other weird obsessions and blatant lies. He ranted about President Joe Biden’s efforts to promote electric power and suggested heat generated this way will make you “itch.” As he vowed to make “major pardons” for some of his supporters who attacked the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection, Trump reiterated some of his preferred, debunked conspiracy theories about that day including that, the FBI is concealing the identity of the unknown pipe bomber and that, somehow, the Middle Eastern terrorist group Hezbollah might have played a role in the violence.
“We have to find out about Hezbollah. We have to find out about who exactly was in that whole thing because people that did some bad things were not prosecuted,” Trump said….
The whole thing was objectively bizarre and it’s difficult to track how much of Trump’s comments were bluster or how many of these wild ideas are even remotely feasible. Can you even effectively rename an ocean? Does he really intend to try to essentially annex Canada? Would he really consider using military force to take over Greenland or the Panama Canal? Would the military stand for that? Would Congress?
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s attention returned Tuesday to an idea that has fascinated him for years: acquiring Greenland for the United States. In a news conference on Tuesday, he refused to rule out using military or economic force to take the territory from Denmark, a U.S. ally.
“We need Greenland for national security purposes,” he said, arguing that Denmark should give it up to “protect the free world.” He threatened to impose tariffs on Denmark if it did not.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that the potential American acquisition of the Arctic territory “is a deal that must happen” and uploaded photos of his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who was visiting Greenland….
Greenland
After the news conference, Denmark sharply rebuked the proposal, saying that the world’s largest island is not for sale, and the prime minister of Greenland, Mute B. Egede, rejected Mr. Trump’s designs on the territory. “Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland,” Mr. Egede said. “Our future and fight for independence is our business.” [….]
Greenland’s vast ice sheets and glaciers are quickly retreating as the Earth warms through accelerating climate change. That melting of ice could allow drilling for oil and mining for minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt. Those mineral resources are essential to rapidly growing industries that make wind turbines, transmission lines, batteries and electric vehicles.
Because of higher temperatures, an estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have already melted in the past three decades, an area roughly the size of Massachusetts….
The melting ice in the Arctic is also opening up a new strategic asset in geopolitics: shorter and more efficient shipping routes. Navigating through the Arctic Sea from Western Europe to East Asia, for example, is about 40 percent shorter compared to sailing through the Suez Canal. Ship traffic in the Arctic has already surged 37 percent over the past decade, according to a recent Arctic Council report.
Donald Trump on Tuesday said the United States would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and the president-elect seemed to tie the prospective renaming to his long-standing grievances with Mexico’s handling of immigration, drug trafficking and trade.
“We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. “ … What a beautiful name, and it’s appropriate.”
The president-elect subsequently decried the Mexican government for allowing migrants to “pour” into the United States, saying Mexico “can stop them and we’re going to put very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada because Canada, they come through Canada, too.”
Trump provided no additional details about how he planned to implement the name change, but the comments sparked immediate questions about whether a president has the authority to rename an international body of water and prompted at least one Republican member of Congress to draft legislation.
That member of Congress was Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Here’s what we know about what Trump can and cannot do to rename the gulf….
The Gulf of Mexico is a 218,000-square-mile oceanic basin connected to the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean through the Florida Straits and the Yucatán Channel. It spans from the eastern coast of Mexico and the southeastern coast of the United States to the western end of Cuba….
There are existing mechanisms to rename places recognized by the federal government. However, if the federal name change becomes official, that does not mean that other nations will recognize it.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names is a federal interagency organization that is responsible for maintaining uniform geographic name usage throughout the federal government. The board operates under the interior secretary. The board’s Foreign Names Committee is responsible for standardizing foreign place names. The committee is composed of representatives from federal agencies, including several appointees specializing in geography and cartography. Members are appointed every two years.
While the BGN does not create names for geographical features, it approves or rejects names proposed by others based on its established policies. A recent example of the board’s work includes approval of replacement names for all features that included the word “squaw,” which is used as a derogatory slur toward NativeAmerican women. The name changes were made after an order by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in 2021. Haaland is the first Native person to serve as a Cabinet secretary.
Trump probably doesn’t know that Mexico and Canada, along with the U.S., are each parts of “America.”–that is, the continent of North America. Of course changing the name is ridiculous and idiotic, but so is Trump.
During the “press conference,” Trump also said that the changes Mark Zuckerberg is making to his social media platforms are in response to his (Trump’s) threats to imprison the the billionaire social media owner.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech.
Zuckerberg said Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.
The company is also changing its content moderation policies around political topics and undoing changes that reduced the amount of political content in user feeds, Zuckerberg said.
The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each boasting billions of users, as well as Threads.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video. “More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Zuckerberg pointed to the election as a major influence on the company’s decision and criticized “governments and legacy media” for, he alleged, pushing “to censor more and more.”
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” he said. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
These two sections outlining speech (written or visual) are new additions:
We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
We do allow content arguing for gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.
Another section that specifically banned making dehumanizing references to transgender or non-binary people as “it” or referring to women “as household objects or property or objects in general” has been removed entirely.
The opening statement about what the policies are “designed to allow room for” that previously listed only health or positive support groups has changed too (new additions marked in bold):
People sometimes use sex- or gender-exclusive language when discussing access to spaces often limited by sex or gender, such as access to bathrooms, specific schools, specific military, law enforcement, or teaching roles, and health or support groups. Other times, they call for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality. Finally, sometimes people curse at a gender in the context of a romantic break-up. Our policies are designed to allow room for these types of speech.
The section that specifically banned targeting people or groups “with claims that they have or spread the novel coronavirus” has also been removed.
Meta on Tuesday announced sweeping changes to how it moderates content that will roll out in the coming months, including doing away with professional fact checking. But the company also quietly updated its hateful conduct policy, adding new types of content users can post on the platform, effective immediately.
Users are now allowed to, for example, refer to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it,’” according to a section of the policy prohibiting such speech that was crossed out. A new section of the policy notes Meta will allow “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.”
Previously, such comments would have been subject to removal under the policy. The changes to Meta’s hateful conduct policy were first reported by Wired.
Meta had hinted in its announcement about its content moderation policy changes Tuesday morning that it would get rid of restrictions on certain topics, such as immigration and gender identity, and allow more political discussions. But the updated policy shows just how quickly Meta is moving to enact CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for “free expression.”
Meta on Tuesday also announced it would do away with its network of independent fact checkers in the United States and will instead rely on user-generated “community notes” to add context to posts. It also said it would adjust its automated systems that scan for policy violations, which it says have resulted in “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.” The systems will now be focused only on extreme violations such as child sexual exploitation and terrorism.
Basically, it’s open season on women and LBGTQ+ people.
Please take care of yourselves today and every day for the next 4 years.
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FILE PHOTO: A mob of supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump fight with members of law enforcement at a door they broke open as they storm the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, U.S., January 6, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis/File Photo
Good Afternoon!!
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the Capitol insurrection. Four years later, Trump will be certified as president–without the riot he sicced on Joe Biden in 2021.
The transfer of power to Donald Trump is shaping up to be, well, peaceful.
No mobs are assembling to disrupt Congress’ Jan. 6 counting of electoral votes. No Democratic leaders are questioning the results of the election or concocting elaborate legal theories to thwart the outcome. The greatest risk of obstruction seems likely to come from a storm system threatening to dump a few inches of snow on the region overnight.
If all goes as expected, by late Monday afternoon, Trump’s victory will be certified in a ceremony overseen by his vanquished rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, who will preside over the proceedings in her capacity as the president of the Senate. Harris has been clear she will administer a straightforward transfer of power. In doing so, she’ll follow in the footsteps of all vice presidents before her — including Mike Pence, who resisted Trump’s pressure to refuse to count electors from states Trump lost in 2020….
It’s the utter antithesis of the carnage unleashed four years ago, under clear blue skies, by thousands of Trump supporters, goaded by lies about a stolen election. Hundreds of them bludgeoned police officers guarding the Capitol as the mob fought to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president.
The meeting of the House and Senate this time, by contrast, is expected to be almost jarringly routine. Harris will convene the joint session at 1 p.m. Lawmakers of both parties will announce the certified electors from each state, and Harris will affirm they have been counted….
Monday’s joint session is also the first governed by a 2022 law designed to prevent efforts to corrupt the transfer of power and limit the ability of lawmakers to mount challenges to the results. That law lowers the already slim odds of any objections that could hamper the proceedings.
Still, the general atmosphere of calm in Washington belies a deep, simmering tension between those who watched the nation’s democratic institutions buckle on Jan. 6, 2021, and those who hope to whitewash it — especially as Trump attempts to rewrite the history of the attack on the Capitol and prepares to pardon many of its perpetrators. The Justice Department has charged more than 1,500 people for their involvement in the attack, and more than 1,200 have pleaded guilty or been convicted.
Trump has promised again and again to free the January 6 “hostages” who violently attacked the center of our government and wounded 174 police officers, and led to the deaths of 5 officers–4 of whom died by suicide.
Brandon Fellows, who broke into the US Capitol on January 6 and smoked marijuana in a senator’s office, stood outside the Washington DC jail where he spent part of his three years’ sentence behind bars, thinking about how Donald Trump might soon help him get his life back on track.
Having served his prison sentence after being found guilty on a slew of federal charges, the 30-year-old is today on probation under terms that have prevented him from leaving the capital region to start a chimney maintenance business in New Jersey. But with Trump returning to the White House on 20 January, Fellows expects his circumstances to change dramatically.
“I’m just going to wait till after the election, make sure I don’t have to partake in a real insurrection if Trump loses, and … then I’ll decide what I’m doing after,” he said about his thinking before November’s presidential election. Now that Trump has won, Fellows is counting on the president-elect to pardon him and other January 6 defendants. “With Trump in office, yeah, I’m starting to plan and [rebuild] my life again,” Fellows said.
As soon as he is back in power, Trump has vowed, he will pardon people prosecuted over the assault on the US Capitol that took place four years ago on Monday. Carried out by a mob of Trump’s supporters after he had addressed them outside the White House, the attack brought political violence into the halls of Congress and has been linked to nine deaths among police and rioters.
“We’re going to look at each individual case, and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office,” Trump told Time magazine in an interview after winning re-election. “A vast majority should not be in jail, and they’ve suffered gravely.”
The pardons would mark the end of a four-year campaign by Joe Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, to hold to account the thousands of rioters who overran police lines and sent lawmakers fleeing the Capitol on the day they convened in 2021 to certify the Democrat’s election victory. The justice department has charged more than 1,500 people with offenses related to the attack in the years since, nearly 600 of whom have faced felony charges of assaulting or impeding law enforcement.
But Trump’s jailed followers are counting the days until they receive the absolution Trump has promised. For more than two years, relatives of those charged in the attack and supporters of the former president have gathered on a sidewalk outside Washington DC’s jail for a nightly vigil called “Freedom Corner”, where January 6 is viewed not as an attack on democracy, but a catalyst for unfair government repression.
In two weeks, Donald J. Trump is to emerge from an arched portal of the United States Capitol to once again take the presidential oath of office. As the Inauguration Day ritual conveying the peaceful transfer of power unfolds, he will stand where the worst of the mayhem of Jan. 6, 2021, took place, largely in his name.
Directly behind Mr. Trump will be the metal-and-glass doors where protesters, inflamed by his lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, stormed the Capitol with clubs, chemical irritants and other weapons. To his left, the spot where roaring rioters and outnumbered police officers fought hand to hand. To his right, where the prostrate body of a dying woman was jostled in the bloody fray.
And before him, a dozen marble steps descending to a lectern adorned with the presidential seal. The same steps where, four years earlier, Trump flags were waved above the frenzied crowd and wielded like spears; where an officer was dragged facedown to be beaten with an American flag on a pole and another was pulled into the scrum to be kicked and stomped.
Officer Daniel Hodges was crushed in a doorway by rioter Patrick McCaughey III
In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s volatile political career seemed over, his incendiary words before the riot rattling the leaders of his own Republican Party. Myriad factors explain his stunning resurrection, but not least of them is how effectively he and his loyalists have laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.
What began as a strained attempt to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility for Jan. 6 gradually took hold, as his allies in Congress and the media played down the attack and redirected blame to left-wing plants, Democrats and even the government. Violent rioters — prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned — somehow became patriotic martyrs.
This inverted interpretation defied what the country had watched unfold, but it neatly fit the persecution narrative that binds Mr. Trump to many of his faithful. Once he committed to running again for president, he doubled down on flipping the script about the riot and its blowback, including a congressional inquiry and two criminal indictments against him, as part of an orchestrated victimization.
That day was an American calamity. Lawmakers huddled for safety. Vice President Mike Pence eluded a mob shouting that he should be hanged. Several people died during and after the riot, including one protester by gunshot and four police officers by suicide, and more than 140 officers were injured in a protracted melee that nearly upended what should have been the routine certification of the electoral victory of Mr. Trump’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But with his return to office, Mr. Trump now has the platform to further rinse and spin the Capitol attack into what he has called “a day of love.” He has vowed to pardon rioters in the first hour of his new administration, while his congressional supporters are pushing for criminal charges against those who investigated his actions on that chaotic day.
Some points of view on Trump upcoming second term as “president”:
The success of President-Elect Donald Trump’s legislative agenda will depend on whether Republicans can close ranks in Congress. They nearly failed on their very first vote.
Mike Johnson won reelection as House speaker by the narrowest of margins this afternoon, and only after two Republican holdouts changed their votes at the last minute. Johnson won on the first ballot with exactly the 218 votes he needed to secure the required majority. The effort he expended to keep the speaker’s gavel portends a tough slog for Trump, who endorsed Johnson’s bid.
Johnson was well short of a majority after an initial tally in the House, which elects a speaker in a long, televised roll call during which every member’s name is called. Three Republicans—Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Keith Self of Texas—voted for other candidates, and another six refused to vote at all in a protest of Johnson’s leadership. The six who initially sat out the roll call cast their votes for Johnson when their names were called a second time. But it took nearly an hour for Johnson to flip Norman and Self. After huddling with Johnson on and off the House floor, the three men walked together to the front of the House chamber, where Norman and Self changed their votes to put Johnson over the top.
The tense vote marked the second Congress in a row in which the formal, usually ceremonial opening of the House became highly dramatic. Two years ago, conservative holdouts forced Kevin McCarthy to endure 15 rounds of voting and days of horse-trading before allowing him to become speaker. With help from Democrats, the same group ousted him nine months later, leading to Johnson’s election as his replacement….
Mike Johnson elected speaker
Yet the members opposing Johnson were not as numerous or dug-in as McCarthy’s adversaries. And although Trump backed McCarthy two years ago, he was more politically invested in Johnson’s success today. A drawn-out fight for the speakership could have threatened his legislative agenda and even delayed the certification of his election. (The House cannot function without a speaker, so it would not have been able to formally open and count the Electoral College ballots as required by the Constitution on January 6.)
Even with today’s relatively swift resolution, Johnson’s struggle to remain speaker is an ominous sign for the GOP’s ability to enact Trump’s priorities in the first few months of his term. The majority that narrowly elected Johnson will temporarily become slimmer once the Senate confirms two Republican lawmakers to Trump’s Cabinet, creating vacancies pending special elections to replace them. And GOP divisions have already emerged over whether the party should launch its governing trifecta with a push to bolster the southern border or combine that effort with legislation extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
Republicans have a bigger buffer in the Senate, where they control 53 seats. But in the House, the GOP edge is two seats smaller than it was at the beginning of the last Congress, and just one or two members will have the power to defeat party-line votes without support from Democrats. Johnson’s main critics, including Massie, Norman, and Self, support Trump’s agenda in the abstract, but they are not loyalists of the president-elect. (Neither Massie nor Roy backed him in the GOP primary last year.) They are far more hawkish on spending than Trump, who showed little concern for deficits in his first term and has pushed Republicans to raise or even eliminate the debt ceiling before he takes office—a move that could smooth the passage of costly tax cuts.
President-elect Donald Trump will begin his second term stronger and more dominant as a player on the world stage than when he was sworn in eight years ago. The world that awaits him, however, is far different — and more threatening — than when he left the presidency four years ago.
Trump’s “America First” second-term focus purports to be principally on the home front. The deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants was one of his leading campaign pledges, and his initial appointments suggest he is serious about this priority. The proposal is fraught with practical and political questions.
Dealing with the domestic economy through tax and spending cuts and regulatory changes was another key promise. Polls suggest the economy — mostly inflation — counted more than other issues did in Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. But many economists have said that Trump’s economic agenda — tariffs and an extension of tax cuts — could lead to a new round of inflation and more debt. Deportations, too, would disrupt the economy.
Trump has also pledged to bring the civil service to heel. An initiative that includes cost-cutting and finding inefficiencies will be led by multibillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and onetime rival Vivek Ramaswamy. The two have grand ambitions and, seemingly, the president-elect’s blessing. Nonetheless, they face multiple challenges before they will be able to deliver more than symbolic changes.
Still, Trump could quickly be drawn into foreign policy challenges. He will confront a world of chaos and conflict: a prolonged war in Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin more hostile than ever, and the Middle East still in turmoil after more than 15 months of warfare, with Iran weakened, Syria without Bashar al-Assad and Israel stronger militarily but scarred internationally because of its conduct in the war in Gaza.
China presents other challenges for Trump, who has threatened major new tariffs on a country with serious economic problems and growing military ambitions. As an indication of his intentions, Trump plans to populate his incoming administration with several China hawks. Meanwhile, governments of key U.S. allies in Europe, particularly France and Germany, are weakened, with right-wing, populist parties on the rise.
Trump prides himself as a dealmaker. His approach to foreign policy in his first term appeared to be more personal than strategic. He prefers dealing with autocrats rather than working with traditional alliances. In his second term, he probably will find it more difficult to work with the likes of Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the leader who sent him what Trump called “love letters,” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” he declared on social media last week.
But by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.
For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.
The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.
“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than prepandemic.”
Of course Trump will promptly take credit for the good economy as soon as he gets into office.
Trump hails Italy’s Giorgia Meloni
Since the election, Trump has been behaving as if he is already president. For example, he has met with several foreign leaders–all autocrats–at his private club in Florida. Another one showed up at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. Emma Bubola at The New York times: Italy’s Prime Minister Visits Trump in Mar-a-Lago.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy visited President-elect Donald J. Trump on Saturday at his Florida golf club for an informal meeting.
The trip to the club, Mar-a-Lago, came only a few days before Ms. Meloni is set to welcome President Biden for an official visit to Italy and the Vatican from Jan. 9 to 12.
On Saturday, she appeared in the grand ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump, according to pool reports, said he was having dinner with Ms. Meloni, whom he called “a fantastic woman,” adding, “She’s really taken Europe by storm, and everyone else.”
They, along with some potential members of the future Trump administration, including the nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and for Treasury, Scott Bessent, then watched a screening of a film titled, “The Eastman Dilemma: Lawfare or Justice.”
Ms. Meloni and Mr. Trump have expressed mutual appreciation in the past, and her trip is one of the first few visits by a foreign leader to the president-elect’s estate in Florida since his election in November. The meeting reinforces the hopes of Ms. Meloni’s supporters that the conservative Italian prime minister will become Mr. Trump’s go-to ally in Europe.
Much of that role would involve mediating tensions between other European leaders and Mr. Trump, who has threatened to start a trade war with the continent, as well as to reduce American backing for some NATO countries and for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
The agenda of the meeting was unclear on Saturday night, but observers expected the two leaders would discuss those issues.
President Joe Biden plans to deliver two major speeches before leaving office as part of an effort to outline what he sees as key parts of his legacy from more than 50 years in public service, according to two people familiar with the plans.
The first speech is set to focus on foreign policy and is expected to be delivered sometime after Biden returns on Jan. 12 from a trip to Italy, these people said. They said Biden then plans to close out his final days in the White House with a farewell address to the country.
Neither speech has been fully drafted, the sources familiar with the president’s plans said, but the contours and themes of both have been developed.
In his farewell address, Biden is expected to offer a message to Americans for the future and reflect on his decades in public office, including his four years in the White House, according to the people familiar with the president’s plans.
The traditional address is expected to channel a similar spirit to the parting sentiments offered by some of Biden’s recent predecessors, including former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who delivered their farewell speeches from the White House, and former President Barack Obama, who opted to speak to the nation from his hometown of Chicago in front of a large audience of supporters….
Biden’s foreign policy speech is set to focus on his belief that America is stronger when it invests in its alliances across the world, according to the people familiar with the president’s speeches. Biden is expected to highlight his efforts to broaden and strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and U.S. relations in the Indo-Pacific, as well as his administration’s military and financial support for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in 2022.
It’s unclear how much the speech might touch on Biden’s decision to order the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which has been widely criticized and resulted in the deaths of 13 American service members.
Biden is likely to reference his administration’s efforts to combat terrorist groups, including ISIS, but the speech is not expected to dwell on domestic terrorism threats following the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, the people familiar with the president’s plans said.
That’s all I have for you today. It’s still kind of quiet as we wrap up the holiday season.
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Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has been elected Senate majority leader, setting the stage for him to replace retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has held the top Senate GOP leadership job for the past 18 years.
Thune has served as Senate Republican whip, the No. 2-ranking position in the Senate GOP leadership, since 2019, and largely managed operation of the Senate floor since McConnell suffered a concussion from a fall in 2023.
Thune beat Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) by a vote of 25 to 24, according to two sources familiar.
Thune led after the first ballot. He won 25 votes while Cornyn won 15 votes and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) collected 13 votes.
“I am extremely honored to have earned the support of my colleagues to lead the Senate in the 119th Congress, and I am beyond proud of the work we have done to secure our majority and the White House,” he said in a statement after the vote. “This Republican team is united behind President Trump’s agenda, and our work starts today.”
And So It Begins . . . Trump’s appoints all the best people:
This is like 2016 only so much worse. For the past couple of days, Trump has been announcing his picks for the Cabinet and other important government posts, and his choices are even worse than we could have imagined.
Trump announced his choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which I guess is sort of reasonable. But it’s likely that one reason for appointing Rubio would be to open up the Senate seat in Florida so that he can give it to Lara Trump. Eventually, Trump will likely fire Rubio in humiliating fashion.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will have a chance to put another stamp on state politics with a big appointment if Sen. Marco Rubio becomes secretary of state. But one major question hangs over that opportunity: How badly does President-elect Donald Trump want his daughter-in-law, Lara, to become a U.S. senator?
Lara Trump, future Senator?
DeSantis, like any Florida governor, has the ability to unilaterally appoint the person who would fill a vacant Senate seat, which may come into play following Monday’s news of Trump’s expected nomination of Rubio to lead the State Department. Trump could still change his mind, cautioned three sources familiar with the selection process, who said the decision wouldn’t be final until the president-elect makes a formal announcement.
But if Rubio’s Senate seat becomes open, there is little doubt DeSantis will face at least some pressure from Trump’s team to appoint a candidate they want, which would almost certainly be Lara Trump, according to seven people tracking deliberations around the potential vacancy.
Perhaps the worst appointment so far came yesterday with the announcement that Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth will serve as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is the person who urged Trump to pardon war criminal Eddie Gallagher.
The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.
“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”
Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
Eddie Gallagher
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
Such dire descriptions of Chief Gallagher, who had eight combat deployments and sometimes went by the nickname Blade, are in marked contrast to Mr. Trump’s portrayal of him at a recent political rally in Florida as one of “our great fighters.” [….]
Video from a SEAL’s helmet camera, included in the trove of materials, shows the barely conscious captive — a teenage Islamic State fighter so thin that his watch slid easily up and down his arm — being brought in to the platoon one day in May 2017. Then the helmet camera is shut off.
In the video interviews with investigators, three SEALs said they saw Chief Gallagher go on to stab the sedated captive for no reason, and then hold an impromptu re-enlistment ceremony over the body, as if it were a trophy.
“I was listening to it, and I was just thinking, like, this is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Special Operator Miller, who has since been promoted to chief, told investigators.
Hegseth is famous at Fox News for announcing that for ten years he never washed his hands.
Hegseth’s selection was a surprise, as he was not among those considered as a likely pick by members of Trump’s team, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN.
Sources said that it came down to Trump having a longstanding relationship with Hegseth, noting that the president-elect always thought he was “smart” and was impressed by his career. Trump also likes that Hegseth is a military veteran and the account of his service in his book, the sources said.
While Hegseth’s name had not been on the initial shortlist, Trump was struggling to land on a choice for the job, and he liked Hegseth from Trump’s last term when he briefly considered him for leading the Department of Veterans Affairs before being warned that he may not get confirmed by the Senate, one source familiar said.
“Trump also thinks he has the look,” one source said….
Trump’s choice of Hegseth is a notable departure from his picks for defense secretary in his first term, when he selected a four-star general, James Mattis, and an Army secretary, Mark Esper, to lead the Pentagon. But Trump ultimately soured on both of those secretaries and was sharply critical of them after Mattis resigned and Esper was fired.
One defense official told CNN, “Everyone is simply shocked.” Another Pentagon official who was following the potential picks for defense secretary learned about the possibility of Hegseth only in the hours before the nomination and, like others who spoke on condition of anonymity with CNN, didn’t know how to react.
Even some former Trump officials who have remained close to former colleagues and have been in touch with the transition were caught off guard. One former Trump official also said they were “shocked” by the selection and expect there’s going to be an effort to “take him down.”
Indeed, in choosing Hegseth, Trump has likely set off what could be his first contentious confirmation fight for a Cabinet pick. While Senate Republicans newly in the majority are likely to be deferential to Trump’s selections, Trump’s nominees can only afford to lose a handful of Republicans to win confirmation.
The article notes that Hegseth opposes women serving in combat. A bit more info:
The Princeton and Harvard grad also served as CEO for veterans advocacy organization Concerned Veterans for America and holds two Bronze Stars, according to Simon & Schuster, the company that published his 2017 book “In the Arena.”
Hegseth says he was removed from inauguration duty in 2021 because of what he described as a religious tattoo.
In his book, Hegseth wrote that he had served under former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump. His unit was tasked to work the inauguration of Joe Biden as well on January 20, 2021.
“Ultimately, members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo,” Hegseth told Fox News during an interview promoting his book in June. Hegseth said the tattoo is a Jerusalem cross.
Hegseth first job will probably be to lead a purge of generals who are not sufficiently loyal to Trump.
Trump’s transition team has a “warrior board” executive order ready for the president-elect’s desk.
An executive order draft is floating around MAGA world that would establish a Trump-appointed “warrior board” with the power to purge any three- or four-star generals as it sees fit. The board would send its dismissal recommendations to Trump and they would be acted upon within 30 days.
The draft executive order, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, makes it easy to quickly remove military officials “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” but leaves open the question of what those requisite qualities are. The executive order draws on General George C. Marshall’s 1940 creation of a “plucking board” led by retired general officers to “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” But that plucking board was to uplift young officers with high potential, not to cull anyone not perfectly aligned with MAGA.
It’s not yet clear if Trump will sign the executive order, but Trump has held vitriol toward certain military leaders for some time now. He has vowed to weaponize them against the “enemy within,” to fire anyone involved in the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and to create a task force to weed out “woke generals.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Fox News host Pete Hegseth as his nominee for defense secretary would place atop the Pentagon a combat veteran and political ally who has assailed the military as ineffective and “woke,” mused about firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,and blasted the top brass as having failed to safeguard American strength.
Hegseth’s nomination suggests a coming battle over social and personnel issues within the armed forces, historically one of the nation’s most diverse institutions. He has been among Trump’s most high-profile supporters to champion the cause of rolling back initiatives designed to promote diversity.
Throughout his campaign, Trump made a distinction between fighting generals and “woke” generals, vowing to fire the latter. Asked in a podcast interview with the “Shawn Ryan Show” published last week what he would do, Hegseth set a tone that looks ominous for senior Pentagon officials.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said, referring to Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. “Any general, any admiral, whatever,” who was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or “woke s—” has “got to go,” Hegseth said.
Now that Ivanka has stepped back from politics, it seems that Don Jr. has become an important adviser to Trump, according the WaPo article:
His [Hegseth’s] nomination represents a major victory for Donald Trump Jr., who has lobbied for the inclusion of more unorthodox candidates, such as Vice President-elect JD Vance and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, against the wishes of establishment Republicans who favored filling key administration roles with those they see as more traditional choices, such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
The breakneck speed of the Hegseth nomination also underscores the value Trump places on TV personalities who have used their platform to promote his agenda.
It’s difficult to believe that Senate Republicans would confirm this nomination, but Trump has demanded that the Senate stay in recess at the beginning of his term so he can put his corrupt choices in place though recess appointments.
Some more appointments that Trump announced yesterday: Mike Huckabee to be Ambassador to Israel; Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a government efficiency department.
A month ago, billionaire Elon Musk warned that if Donald Trump won a second presidential term and gave him a role in government, Americans would need to “reduce spending to live within our means” and suffer “temporary hardship” in order to address the national debt. On Tuesday, the Tesla CEO seemed closer to achieving that goal after the president-elect announced Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).
The two entrepreneurs will be tasked with paving the way for Trump’s administration “to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump said in a statement.
Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk
He added that DOGE could “become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time” and that the department would partner with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Exactly how DOGE would “provide advice and guidance from outside of government” was not clear.
In the statement shared by Trump, Musk declared that DOGE “will send shockwaves through the system and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”
“Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending. They will work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE,’” Trump continued. The president-elect ended by stating DOGE’s work will “conclude” no later than July 4, 2026, and that a “smaller government” will be the “perfect gift” to the American people, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Presumably, the DOGE will not tamper with all the government contracts that Musk’s companies receive.
Apparently Musk is still in Trump’s good graces, but he’s wearing out his welcome with many staff members and other Mar-a-Lago denizens. He has been horning in on Trump’s meetings and phone calls. Musk even wanted to go along with Trump for his meeting with President Joe Biden today!
In nearly every meeting that President-elect Donald J. Trump holds at Mar-a-Lago, alongside him is someone who has been elected to nothing, nominated to nothing and, only a few months ago, had no meaningful relationship with him.
Elon Musk.
The world’s richest person has ascended to a position of extraordinary, unofficial influence in Mr. Trump’s transition process, playing a role that makes him indisputably America’s most powerful private citizen. He has sat in on nearly every job interview with the Trump team and bonded with the Trump family, and he is trying to install his Silicon Valley friends in plum positions in the next administration.
Mr. Musk has assumed an almost mythical aura in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. At Mar-a-Lago one recent evening, he walked into the dining room about 30 minutes after the president-elect did and received a similar standing ovation, according to two people who saw him enter.
Mr. Musk, often with his 4-year-old son X on his lap, has spent most of the last week at Mar-a-Lago, joining not just interviews but almost every meeting and many meals that Mr. Trump has had. He briefly shuttled back to Austin, Texas, where he has a $35 million compound, before returning on Friday, where he ate in Mar-a-Lago’s dining room and on its patio, roamed the gift shop and spent time on the golf course — all alongside the president-elect.
“I’m happy to be the first buddy!” he replied to a social-media follower this weekend.
Elon Musk on Wednesday joined President-elect Donald Trump for his first post-election meeting with the House Republican conference in Washington, D.C., an adviser to Trump told NBC News. Trump and Musk flew to the nation’s capital together from Florida aboard Trump’s plane.
The development is the latest example of how Musk, the world’s richest man and one of the top backers of Trump’s winning campaign, has grown his presence and influence in the future president’s orbit.
ELON BUTTS IN — Later this morning, Trump travels to Washington for the first time since his sweeping presidential victory last week, where he’ll make the customary visit to the White House and huddle with allies on Capitol Hill.
Earlier this week, however, Trump’s inner circle was abuzz that he might have a traveling companion for the trip: not wife MELANIA, who is remaining in Florida, but ELON MUSK — who privately expressed interest in joining Trump for his visit with President JOE BIDEN, to the vexation of some Trump insiders.
To be fair, there have been few boundaries on Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign and now in his transition. Last night, Trump announced that Musk would co-lead a “Department of Government Efficiency” — a sort of meme-ified Simpson-Bowles commission — alongside MAGA hype man VIVEK RAMASWAMY.
But the notion of allowing Musk to tag along to the White House, for a hallowed ritual in the peaceful transfer of power, prompted a bewildered reaction inside Trump world: Was that even allowed?What was the protocol for such a thing?
As of last night, it appears the plan might not materialize. After appearing earlier this week on a draft manifest for this morning’s flight to D.C., we couldn’t get a clear answer last night on whether Musk is coming or not.
The bigger picture, however, is how Musk is starting to wear out his welcome with some in Trump’s orbit. After initially making a huge splash with his endorsement, made just moments after the July attempt on Trump’s life, some insiders now say he’s become almost a comical distraction, hanging around Mar-a-Lago, sidling into high-level transition meetings and giving unsolicited feedback on Trump’s personnel decisions.
“Elon is getting a little big for his britches,” one insider tells Playbook.
Trump, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind, relishing the attention he’s getting from the richest man in the world. Over the weekend, our colleagues Meridith McGraw and Natalie Allison reported, Trump was zipping Musk around in his golf cart, introducing him to club members and showing him the resort’s gift shop.
That proximity has given Musk access to some of the most intimate details of the Trump transition. For example: While much was made about Musk joining Trump’s recent call with Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, we’re told that the encounter was more or less a fluke: Musk happened to be in the room when Zelenskyy called, and Trump put him on the phone.
I could go on, but this post is already too long. I have no doubt there will be more horrors to deal with today. today.
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Tokuriki Tomikichiro, Black Cat Three-Kittens Butterfly
Good Afternoon!!
There are just 3 more days to go until E-Day. I just hope what’s left of our democracy survives the election and whatever horrors the Trump people have in store if he loses. And I think he is going to lose; he certainly seems to be preparing for that outcome.
Things are looking good for Harris at the moment. The polls are definitely moving in her direction, and some experts are questioning whether the race is as close as the media wants to make it.
Kamala Harris is on track to become America’s first female president by a narrow margin thanks to the Democratic vote holding up in the rust belt of old industrial states, according to the final Times poll before the US election.
Of the seven swing states that will decide the White House, Harris is forecast to win three battlegrounds in the north known as the “blue wall”, as well as Nevada in the west, while Donald Trump is favoured to claim back Georgia and hold North Carolina, YouGov found. The two rivals are level-pegging in Arizona….
Of the rust belt states, Harris is four points ahead among likely voters in Wisconsin, and three points ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania. She is one point ahead in Nevada. Likely voters are evenly split in Arizona, and Trump is one point ahead in both Georgia and North Carolina.
The Times surveyed the seven swing states because the outcome in the other 43 states is far more predictable….
If the results after election day on Tuesday turn out like the YouGov poll, Harris would win the Oval Office by a margin of 276 electoral college votes to 262. This would make it the closest finish since the 2000 election, which was decided by 271 to 266 after a month of legal wrangling about Florida’s result was resolved by the Supreme Court.
Read more and see the data at the link.
The presidential race could very well be decided by women. I still believe that abortion is the number 1 issue in this election.
When Alex Cooper, the popular podcaster behind “Call Her Daddy,” released her widely discussed interview with Democrat Kamala Harris last month, she revealed she had invited the vice president’s Republican opponent, Donald Trump, to appear on her show as well.
“If he also wants to have a meaningful and in-depth conversation about women’s rights in this country, then he is welcome on ‘Call Her Daddy’ anytime,” Cooper told her millions of listeners, most of them women.
Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi, What is for dinner?
Trump’s campaign had received an offer to join the show, according to sources close to the former president, but ultimately decided to pass. Instead, Trump doubled down on a strategy of speaking directly to America’s young men through appearances on right-leaning, male-dominated online shows. He will end his campaign Tuesday having largely avoided podcasts, YouTube channels and daytime TV shows tailored toward female audiences.
And if Trump’s third White House bid falls short, his approach to courting women – who narrowly outnumber men and are more reliable voters – may be among his campaign’s most scrutinized strategies. Trump advisers and allies had argued throughout the late summer and early fall that his appeal among men would make up for the lack of support from female voters, but in recent weeks the widening gender gap has caused alarm for some Republicans.
“We’ve seen a women problem for all Republicans, up and down the ballot,” one Trump-aligned GOP operative told CNN. “It starts at the top.”
Let’s face it. Trump never had much chance to win over very many women who aren’t evangelicals.
Trump’s uncertainty about how to appeal to women has been evident even in the final days of his campaign, leading to public disagreements with his staff over his messaging. At a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, he recounted advice from aides urging him to drop his repeated promise to be women’s “protector” because they saw it as inappropriate.
“‘Sir, please don’t say that,’” he said he was advised. “Why? I’m president. I want to protect the women of our country. Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them,” Trump told the crowd….
Behind the scenes and on the phone with close allies, Trump will ask why women don’t like him, three sources familiar with the conversations said.
“He thinks women want someone who will keep them safe. Keep their children safe,” one of the sources said.
…[B]eyond his rallies, women do not appear to be responding to the former president’s attempts to reach them. The latest ABC News/Ipsos national poll showed Trump trailing Harris among likely female voters by 14-points – a margin that far outpaces his 6-point lead among men.
Adding to Trump’s challenges is a gender gap in early voting. In the seven most contested battleground states, women have cast 55% of ballots so far, while men account for 45%, according to Catalist, a Democratic-aligned data firm. This 10-point disparity representing nearly 1.4 million ballots, though slightly less than it was four years ago, nevertheless has Trump allies concerned.
Trump is really falling apart in embarrassing and humiliating ways. Last night he appeared to simulate oral sex during his rally in Wisconsin. He also spent about 5 minutes of one of his final chances to reach voters complaining about his microphone and threatening not to pay his audio staff.
Republican nominee Donald Trump faced a fresh controversy on Friday after he suggested former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) should have guns “trained on her face,” escalating his vilification of a prominent critic from within his party, as well as his use of violent imagery….
Cheney said Trump’s intent was to intimidate anyone who challenges him. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) said her office is investigating whether Trump’s comments could have violated state laws involving intimidation of public officials, spokesperson Richie Taylor said.
“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney, who lost her position in House Republican leadership for condemning Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, and went on to serve as vice chair of the committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol, said Friday on social media. “They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Relationship by Toshuki Fukuda
It appears that frontal lobe damage from his dementia has left Trump with absolutely no inhibitions or filter on what he will say or do in public.
During his Glendale appearance, Trump suggested his Republican critic should face ‘nine barrels shooting at her.’
Arizona’s top prosecutor tells 12News she is investigating whether Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump violated state law by making a “death threat” against former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney during remarks Thursday night at an event in Glendale.
“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Attorney General Mayes, a first-term Democrat, said during Friday’s taping of “Sunday Square Off.”
“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state.”
We know that Trump will challenge the results if Harris wins, and there very well could be violence. The Harris campaign says they expect Trump to claim victory before all the votes are counted–as he did in 2020.
Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are rolling out a late-stage campaign strategy that borrows heavily from the subversive playbook he used to challenge his loss four years ago.
This time, however, he is counting on reinforcements from outside groups built on the false notion of a stolen election.
With Election Day only three days away, Mr. Trump is already claiming the Democrats are “a bunch of cheats,” as his allies in battleground states spread distorted reports of mishaps at the polls to push a narrative of widespread fraud.
Mr. Trump and his most prominent supporters have pointed to partisan polling and betting markets to claim that he is heading for a “crushing victory,” as his top surrogate Elon Musk recently put it. The expectation helps set the stage for disbelief and outrage among his supporters should he lose.
Black Cat White Cat, by Toshuki Fukuda
And in a direct echo of his failed — and, prosecutors say, illegal — bid to remain in power after the 2020 election, some of his most influential advisers are suggesting he will yet again seek to claim victory before all the votes are counted.
Such a move ushered in his efforts to deny his defeat four years ago and helped set the stage for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In many respects, though, the effort that led to Jan. 6 never ended.
“It’s been four years of spreading lies about elections and recruiting volunteers to challenge the system, filing litigation,’’ said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works with state officials to bolster confidence in their elections. “What we’re seeing today is all of that coming to fruition.” [….]
In a statement, Dana Remus, a top lawyer for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, said, “It isn’t surprising that he is already questioning the results of a still ongoing election” and added, “He failed when he tried this in 2020, and he will fail again.”
The authors note that some things are different though.
For all the similarities, there are important differences between now and 2020, some of which reassure the coalition of civil rights lawyers, Democrats, Republicans and election administrators working to prevent a repeat of 2020:
Congress has passed a new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, meant to make it harder to stop the final certification of the results by Congress on Jan. 6, as Mr. Trump tried to do four years ago.
Mr. Trump no longer has control of the federal government — which he sought to use to press his 2020 case. In the states, there are fewer like-minded Republicans in key positions of power than there were four years ago.
Some of the loudest clarions for stolen election theories have paid heavily for circulating them, including Fox News, which last year paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to settle a lawsuit over the network’s promotion of false theories that Dominion’s machines had switched votes.
And the experience of 2020, along with more recent clashes over voting issues, has taught election administrators lessons about fortifying themselves against a similar effort this year.
“You have the benefit of something having happened once before,” said the Pennsylvania secretary of state, Al Schmidt, a Republican. “You learn from it to guide you moving forward.”
Another story could affect the race, although it may be too late and to complicated–the tapes of Jeffrey Epstein talking about Trump that were just revealed. It’s shocking that many in the media have been sitting on these tapes for a long time.
A New York author and journalist has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Donald Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied.
The tapes, released as part of the Fire and Fury podcast series by Michael Wolff, author of three books about Trump’s first term and 2020 bid for a second, and James Truman, former NME journalist and Condé Nast editorial director, include Epstein’s thoughts about the inner workings of the former US president’s inner circle.
Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Despite his crimes, the wealthy financier was at the heart of a social circle of the rich and powerful in the US and overseas that contained many famous names.
Wolff claims the excerpt tape is a mere fraction of some “100 hours of Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House and about his longstanding, deep relationship with Donald Trump”….
By Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi
The Fire and Fury tapes reveal Epstein recalling how then president Trump played his circle off against each other. “His people fight each other and then he poisons the well outside,” he says.
The author names Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway as being among the acolytes and officials Trump played off each other like courtiers in a competitive court.
“He will tell 10 people ‘Bannon’s a scumbag’ and ‘Priebus is not doing a good job’ and ‘Kellyanne has a big mouth – what do you think?’
“‘[JPMorgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon says that you’re a problem and I shouldn’t keep you. And I spoke to [financier] Carl Icahn. And Carl thinks I need a new spokesperson.’”
Epstein continues his exposition of Trump’s approach to management: “So Kelly[anne] – even though I hired Kellyanne’s husband – Kellyanne is just too much of a wildcard. And then he tells Bannon: ‘You know I really want to keep you but Kellyanne hates you.’”
In response to the podcast, Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, said, “Wolff is a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics” and accused the author of making “outlandish false smears” and engaging in “blatant election interference on behalf of Kamala Harris”.
This could be embarrassing for Trump, but I doubt if most voters be affected by it.
At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.
“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”
The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)
By Toshiuki Fukuda
Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.
“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”
It’s a long, detailed article. If you’re interested in reading the rest, here is a gift link.
With much of the attention on the House gravitating towards the battleground states of New York and California, where Democrats are trying to push back GOP gains from 2022, a handful of races scattered around the country heading into Election Day could ultimately be the difference in which party holds the majority.
Logan Phillips, the founder of Race to the WH, has his eyes on a handful of races that he sees as potential flips, including the race in Maine’s Second District, Washington’s Third District and two swing districts the Pennsylvania, where he thinks might serve a bellwhethers.
In Maine’s Second District, Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat, is defending his seat from the Republican challenger Austin Theriault. The race is closely watched because Golden has held onto the seat since defeating the incumbent Republican in 2018, even though former President Donald Trump carried the rural Second District in both 2016 and 2020. In 2022, Golden won by six points. Golden currently leads in FiveThirtyEight’s average by 1.9 points.
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez is in a similar situation in Washington’s Third, as the freshman representative is attempting to hold onto her seat a district that also supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Gluesenkamp Pérez won in 2022 by less than a point. In FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, the GOP challenger, Joe Kent, leads by a point.
In general, Phillips gives Democrats a better chance of winning the chamber than other prognosticators. He currently gives Democrats a 70% chance of winning control of the chamber while most forecasters see it as a coin flip. While he cautions that he doesn’t see them as the overwhelming favorite to win, he was also among the most accurate forecasters in 2022, projecting that Republicans would win 223 seats. The GOP ended up winning 222.
“There are plenty of strong incumbents on both sides of the aisle. The reason I view democrats as favored is that Democrats have recruited stronger challengers,” Phillips said. “Democrats are in a stronger position to take on those incumbents.”
Read the rest at Salon.
That’s where things stand today. I guess a lot could happen in 3 days, but I think Harris is going to win. I hope and pray that I’m right.
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Okay, I’m too cheeky today, so fuck all that. Let’s see what Stephen Colbert had to say last night, as reported by 
The results in the states were not as cheery as they could’ve been. This was especially true for ballot initiatives. This is from 
Forbes
Representatives from the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had this to say.
Trump’s lies are still making Broadcast news. This is from 
I’m eager to see the Black Friday sales numbers. The only thing booming in the economy is AI-related stocks. They are bubblelicious. And the news and demand for the Epstein files just keeps on building. This is from 
Karma can be a bitch after all. Here are a few other suggestions as a close-out to this post.
Trump has promised again and again to free the January 6 “hostages” who violently attacked the center of our government and wounded 174 police officers, and led to the deaths of 5 officers–4 of whom died by suicide.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
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quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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