Finally Friday Reads: Sure Doesn’t Feel like a New Year

Posted: January 2, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: "Der Fuehrer's Face", "presidential immunity", #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked, Democratic Backsliding | Tags: , , , , , | 6 Comments

Happy New Year! John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Nothing like the threat of yet another war to start a New Year off. Today, the rotter in the White House is threatening to attack Iran if it does not allow peaceful protests. The Trump regime made it clear to the Iranian regime that it would intervene if protestors were shot or killed, that “We are locked and loaded, and ready to go”. Naturally, this was announced on social media, given that usual diplomatic channels appear to be dysfunctional.

I find this very odd, given that peaceful protests in this country have been investigated by the DOJ as acts of terrorism this year. I’ve specifically linked to CNN Coverage of protests at Columbia University here as an example. So much for the Nobel Peace Prize aspirations.

This is from The Guardian. “Iranian officials warn Trump not to cross ‘red line’ over threats to intervene in protests. US president’s posts that US will come to the rescue of protesters prompt warnings of ‘regret-inducing response.'”  It is reported today by William Christou.

Donald Trump has threatened to intervene in Iran if its government kills demonstrators, prompting warnings from senior Iranian officials that any American interference would cross a “red line”.

In a social media post on Friday, Trump said that if Iran were to shoot and kill protesters, the US would “come to their rescue”. He added “we are locked and loaded, and ready to go”, without explaining what that might mean in practice.

Protests in Iran are in their sixth day, and are the largest since 2022, when the death in police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini triggered demonstrations across the country. The current unrest was triggered by an unprecedented decline in the value of the national currency on Sunday. The Iranian rial dropping to about 1.4m to the US dollar, further harming an already beleaguered economy.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, called Trump’s statement “reckless and dangerous,” and said the country’s military was on standby. He also said the protests had been mostly peaceful, but that attacks on public property would not be tolerated.

“Given President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard within US borders, he of all people should know that criminal attacks on public property cannot be tolerated,” he said.

At least seven people have been killed, , and videos have shown security forces carrying shotguns with the sound of shooting in the background.

In response to Trump’s threat of intervention, Ali Shamkhani, adviser to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, warned that Iran’s national security was a “red line, not material for adventurist tweets”.

“Any intervening hand nearing Iran security on pretexts will be cut off with a regret-inducing response,” Shamkhani said in a post on X.

The threats come just days after Trump said that the US could strike Iran if it was found to be rebuilding its nuclear programme, further escalating tensions between the two countries.

Today’s New York Times’Matthew Purdy has this excellent analysis. “After Watergate, the Presidency Was Tamed. Trump Is Unleashing It. In the 1970s, Congress passed a raft of laws to hold the White House accountable. President Trump has decided they don’t apply to him.”

A power-hungry president had twisted the government into a tool for his personal political benefit. His aides kept an “enemies list” of opponents to be punished. His cronies ran the Justice Department and he made puppets of other agencies that were meant to be independent. Corporations that wanted favorable treatment from the White House were pressured to make illegal contributions to the president’s political coffers.

As revelations of rot in the Nixon administration tumbled out through the 1970s, Senator Lawton Chiles, Democrat of Florida, captured the alarm of the Watergate era: “Nothing will bring the Republic to its knees so quickly as a bone-deep mistrust of the government by its own people,” he said. “We have seen other democracies fall within our own lifetime. Fall through internal corruption rather than outside invasion.”

…

The aim was not just to excise what one aide to President Richard M. Nixon described as “a cancer,” but to prevent a recurrence. “Watergate reform is not for the past or for the present,” Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a Connecticut Republican, wrote in a 1976 addendum to a Senate report. “Our memories may indeed keep us free today. It is for unborn generations who will never know firsthand how close a democracy came to oligarchy.”

From the opening days of his second term, President Trump took aim at Watergate’s ethical checkpoints as if in a shooting gallery. First, he fired 17 inspectors general, a job established in the Watergate era to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse in government. He also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency created by legislation in 1978 to protect government whistle-blowers. Then he fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, created around the same time to guard against financial conflicts of interest by top government officials. And he has used the Justice Department and the F.B.I. as political tools, roles they worked to shed after Watergate.

A strain of conservative legal thinking has been aiming to reassert the president’s powers ever since they were curbed in the post-Watergate era. But while Mr. Trump’s lawyers successfully make the case for expanding presidential authority based on a high-minded Constitutional argument, there is a raw political result. He has removed barriers that might slow his pursuit of a highly personal presidency — punishing opponents and rewarding allies and financial backers while also reaping profits for family businesses that intersect with his powers as president.

You may read the entire analysis at the link. It’s gifted, and it’s worth taking the time to read the entire thing. I was in high school when the entire Watergate scandal unfolded, and I must say that the entire experience profoundly shaped my political views.

We have another TACO event today, which is good news. This is from the AP. “Trump delays increased tariffs on upholstered furniture, kitchen cabinets, and vanities for a year.” This is reported by Michelle L. Price.

President Donald Trump signed a New Year’s Eve proclamation delaying increased tariffs on upholstered furniture, kitchen cabinets and vanities for a year, citing ongoing trade talks.

Trump’s order signed Wednesday keeps in place a 25% tariff he imposed in September on those goods, but delays for another year a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture and 50% tariff on kitchen cabinets and vanities.

The increases, which were set to take effect Jan. 1, come as the Republican president instituted a broad swath of taxes on imported goods to address trade imbalances and other issues.

The president has said the tariffs on furniture are needed to “bolster American industry and protect national security.”

The delay is the latest in the roller coaster of Trump’s tariff wars since he returned to office last year, with the president announcing levies at times without warning and then delaying or pulling back from them just as abruptly.

One last bit of analysis by NPR’s Stephen Fowler. “With few Epstein files released, conspiracy theories flourish and questions remain.”

During the 2024 election, President Trump promised to release the Epstein files as part of a campaign message arguing the government was run by powerful people hiding the truth from Americans.

At the start of 2026, many people agree — and believe that he is now one of the powerful few keeping the public in the dark.

In the two weeks since the Justice Department failed to fully meet a legal deadline to release its expansive tranche of files on Jeffrey Epstein, old conspiracy theories about his life and death have subsided and new ones have taken shape. The late financier was a convicted sex offender and accused of sex trafficking minors while associating with top figures in politics, academia and other influential industries.

Both supporters of the president and his opponents have criticized the rollout of documents, often heavily redacted and shared without any clear organization or context. Included in the roughly 40,000 pages of new information published in the last week are unvetted tips from the public — and a complaint made to the FBI more than a decade before Epstein was first criminally charged.

There could be well over a million files still unreleased, along with potentially terabytes-worth of data seized from Epstein’s devices and estate, according to 2020 emails between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York included in the most recent batch of files.

On Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote on social media that lawyers were working “around the clock” to review documents but did not specify the scope or scale of the remaining work.

“It truly is an all-hands-on-deck approach and we’re asking as many lawyers as possible to commit their time to review the documents that remain,” Blanche said. “Required redactions to protect victims take time but they will not stop these materials from being released. The Attorney General’s and this Administration’s goal is simple: transparency and protecting victims.”

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is threatening to take action against the Justice Department for failing to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed in November, but the law itself contains no penalties or enforcement mechanism.

Politically, the Epstein files saga caps off a rocky first year for an administration facing record-low favorability ratings and a president whose grasp on his base is appearing to slip. Trump spent most of 2025 downplaying the significance of the files, at times lashing out against Republicans who demanded the release of information about other potential perpetrators.

Read more at the link.

So, I’m fighting a cold that won’t give up and trying to spend my last few days of vacation cleaning up the house. It’s definitely a period of out with the old and in with the new for me. I’m fortunate to have a friend helping me in all these endeavors, but the last thing I needed was a damn cold. But, with the wacky weather we’re having this winter, I’m not surprised. We keep jumping from near-freezing temperatures to the 80s. Drastic changes like that always get to me.

I’m wishing all of you the best for this new year. It’s more important than ever to be kind to yourself, and as Maya Angelou once said, “Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.”

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

Friday Reads: WTF is Wrong with this Country?

Posted: September 12, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: "Der Fuehrer's Face", hate speech, Killings | Tags: , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

“The idolization of Charlie Kirk is gross.” John Buss, re@peat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I have to admit that when I first read my undergrad psychology textbook, and when we hit the unit on personality disorders, I really had never heard the term “sociopath”.  I read it and recognized my father-in-law right there in the definition.

When Doctor Daughter had her rotation and classes in psych, she was told by her professor that the perfect example of a narcissist was good ol’ Yam Tits. Evidently, the “reality show” he had at the time–which I never bothered to watch–was chock-full of examples good enough for med students to use as examples for diagnosis. This day and age I get to experience all that human toxicity constantly.

When I was getting my teaching certificate in the 1970s, we were part of the first generation of teachers who had to know all kinds of disabilities and emotional and mental issues so we could identify students with possible issues and suggest they see the school psychologists. We had the duty to report any signs of abuse, also. That’s the point at which I started working more diligently towards my terminal degree. Little did I know that the same problems invaded all levels of education.

There was a shooter recently in the library at the campus where I taught for years. Just yesterday, there were lockdowns and shooter alerts at many campuses, including all historically Black colleges, the Naval Academy, and UMass Boston. That includes Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where evidently one sociopath took out another.  The AP reports, “A list of all deadly shootings on college campuses in the USA.”  Thankfully, several of the ones yesterday–specifically UMass Boston and the Naval Academy–were false alarms. The shooting at a high school in Colorado was real and has been conveniently ignored by the majority of the media.  The one at FSU yesterday was real and deadly.

The latest deadly shooting on a college campus in the U.S. unfolded Thursday at Florida State University, where two people were killed and at least six others were wounded.

Frightened students, faculty and parents there for a tour took cover and waited in classrooms, offices and dorms across the university in Tallahassee after it issued an active shooter alert. Some crammed into a freight elevator after hearing gunshots outside the student union.

The gun used in the shooting belonged to the 20-year-old suspect’s mother, who has worked for the sheriff’s office for 18 years, authorities said. They described the gun as her former service weapon.

The gunman, believed to be a student at the university, was shot and wounded by officers and was taken into custody, according to authorities. The two people who died were not students.

Florida State’s main library was the site of another shooting in 2014, when a 31-year-old gunman wounded three people before he was shot and killed by police.

Experts say mass shootings on college campuses, although rare, are often on the minds of students today because they grew up participating in active shooter drills in elementary and high school.

It was only natural that one sociopath with a gun would eventually shoot another sociopath who viciously spread hate throughout the internet and the country. Here are some of Charlie Kirk’s “Greatest Hits.” He basically hated everyone who wasn’t a cis White Christian Male in the mode of his form of Christianity. There are two historical concepts of historical justice that come to mind.  The first one is Karma. The second is “You reap what you sow.”  The third one is a morphed version of an older one. “Live by the gun, die by the gun.” Of course, I support free speech. Of course, I abhor gun violence and all kinds of killing.

It doesn’t take much in the way of brains, though, to determine that when you basically dare the world to argue with your hate speech, you’re going to attract some unwanted attention. It’s kind of like the old male stereotype that if you wear provocative clothing and show up in the wrong place, you deserve to be raped.  If a lot of sick men believe this about women, then a lot of sick men are going to be violent in the face of taunting, also. There are a lot of lone white male shooters out there just willing to go on a hunt. Charlie Boy enabled them with weapons and hate speech.

Here are some of Charlie Boy’s greatest hits. There are many more. I’m also pretty sure that I wonder if a little girl is better off under a father who tells her she should be a slave to a husband and would force her to carry the product of a rape to term at 10 years old.

The victims of mass shootings in this country–including children and the elderly worshipping in their holy place–basically become numbers unless their grief-stricken relatives force us to remember them by asking the media and the public to listen to their stories and the acts of violence that ended their lives.  Why aren’t they victims of political assassination whose ends are covered relentlessly on the internet and TV? What about the details of the other folks this week who lost their lives to gun violence?  I found this article on The Verge that contains a lot of good questions as we investigate Charlie Boy’s shooter, whose own family turned him in.

The fatal shooting of Kirk on Wednesday led to an intense manhunt across Utah, though it encountered numerous complications along the way. Several leads, publicly teased by FBI Director Kash Patel, quickly petered out. Leaked documents from law enforcement published by MAGA influencers led to false narratives about how markings on the bullet indicated that the shooter was in favor of “transgender ideology.”

It was nearly impossible to divorce politics and internet misinformation from Kirk’s death, however. The 31-year-old was a powerful figure in the MAGA movement, as the founder and leader of the right-wing college group Turning Point USA, and a prominent podcaster and MAGA influencer himself, famous for appearing on college campuses to confront liberal students. President Donald Trump credited Kirk and TPUSA as a factor in his return to office, and frequently relied on him as an emissary to youth voters.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, his allies in the MAGA movement, including lawmakers and influencers, promised swift retribution against the left should the killer share their ideology. The themes of Helldivers 2 could have an ideological meaning, albeit not necessarily a straightforward one. But ultimately, the messages on the shooter’s bullet casings can best be described as bizarre and extremely online.

The writings on the bullet were  clever, cruel, and spot on.

It’s not hard to see where the “antifascist” conclusion came from on two of the other bullets: “Bella ciao” is an Italian song adopted by partisans and resistance fighters while Italy was governed by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Cox said in response to a question during the conference that the “hey fascist” message “speaks for itself.” Three downward-slanting arrows are a symbol used by both historical and contemporary antifascists.

But the full arrow sequence was quickly recognized as something else: a combo from Helldivers 2 for calling the Eagle 500kg Bomb stratagem. The world of Helldivers — which evokes Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers and the subsequent movie — concerns fascism thematically; developer Arrowhead has characterized it as a satire where players fight for a fascist state.

As for the use of “Bella ciao,” the song has no obvious connection but given its historical significance, unsurprisingly does appear in a Helldivers 2 mod, as well as in at least one other video game, a World War II-themed strategy game called Hearts of Iron IV.

There is no doubt that Charlie Boy was a fascist. He’s left a trail that would reach the sun.  However, we do have free speech; fascists can speak as they wish. But what happens when that talk reaches into vile hate speech and suggests things like “Gay people should be stoned to death”?  We need to have a huge conversation on the fine line between exercising your right to free speech and making suggestions that crazy white men with guns will act on.

This is my very short post today with its very short questions. While this shooter used a slightly modified long gun typically used for hunting, do we really need military style weapons floating around a society where we can identify so many personality disorders and severe mental illnesses?   Germany has basically outlawed anything NAZI-related.  If that’s going too far, what’s the point at which we hold public figures accountable for out-and-out hate speech and suggestions that might provoke action? Also, shouldn’t there be some point at which giving a Presidential Medal of Honor to someone who dedicated their career to hate speech should be universally condemned? When is saying don’t speak ill of the dead too passive?  Can we celebrate the death of Hitler while ignoring the fact that NAZIs are among us?  What happened to the only good NAZI is a dead NAZI? Is that just rhetoric or going to far?  I sure wouldn’t shoot aNAZI even though my father bombed them, but I sure would spit in their face and then meditate on the nature of karma.

My fellow Americans, we need to have a good, long talk and stop all this fawning over your basic bully and start discussing how the fuck we’ve lost our way so badly.

Don’t forget we have a Department of War now. Don’t forget the mission of ICE now. We’re in this deep and for some time. My guitar and I gently weep.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?