Mostly Monday Reads: Life in the Time of Cruelty
Posted: November 10, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked, court rulings, Democratic Politics, presidential pardons | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Donald Trump only cares about himself, Hasten Down the Wind, Kim Davis, Obergefell v. Hodges, same sex marriage judicial decisions, SCOTUS, Senate Democrats Cave, Trump Pardons, Warren Zevon 10 Comments
“The end is nigh. Gas prices haven’t dropped, electric bills have gone up, groceries are ridiculous, a year later, Putin is still killing Ukrainians, there is no peace in the Middle East, tariff costs are still passed on to consumers, America is once again the laughing stock of the world, need I say more?” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
There has been another bit of good news to complement last week’s. However, we cannot let our guard down or our actions slacken. Even a few battles won will not end a war. Today, the Supreme Court dismissed a case to overturn its landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
There is a distinct possibility that a stronger attempt may be underway, so vigilance is necessary. More analysis is likely to come out as court watchers ponder the decision.
This is from the AP’s Mark Sherman. “Supreme Court rejects call to overturn its decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.” The dissenting voices hint that more compelling cases may come before them.
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a call to overturn its landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the high court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Davis had been trying to get the court to overturn a lower-court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to a couple denied a marriage license.
Her lawyers repeatedly invoked the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who alone among the nine justices has called for erasing the same-sex marriage ruling.
Thomas was among four dissenting justices in 2015. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are the other dissenters who are on the court today.
Roberts has been silent on the subject since he wrote a dissenting opinion in the case. Alito has continued to criticize the decision, but he said recently he was not advocating that it be overturned.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was not on the court in 2015, has said that there are times when the court should correct mistakes and overturn decisions, as it did in the 2022 case that ended a constitutional right to abortion
But Barrett has suggested recently that same-sex marriage might be in a different category than abortion because people have relied on the decision when they married and had children.
The basis of Davis’ complaint may be the reason why the religious fanatics placed on SCOTUS by extreme right-wing theocrats might have been encouraged to wait for a more direct call to overrule Obergfell. This is explained in this NBC News analysis by Lawrence Hurley.
But reconsidering Obergefell was not the main legal question presented in Davis’ appeal.
Although the court has a 6-3 conservative majority, none of the other justices joined Thomas’ opinion.
Just last month, Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the abortion ruling, indicated he was not pushing for Obergefell to be overturned.
Davis, represented by the conservative group Liberty Counsel, refused to issue any marriage licenses in the immediate aftermath of the Obergefell decision. She said that as a conservative Christian who opposed same-sex marriage, she should have a religious right not to put her name on marriage licenses involving same-sex couples.
Her office in Rowan County, Kentucky, denied licenses to several such couples, including David Moore and David Ermold, who subsequently filed a civil rights lawsuit.
Davis was ordered to issue a license for Moore and Ermold, but defied the court injunction and still refused to do so. The judge then held her in contempt, and she was jailed for six days.
While she was jailed, Moore and Ermold were able to obtain their marriage license.
Subsequently, the state changed the law in order to address the controversy, allowing for a license to be issued without the clerk’s name on it.
But Davis’ case continued, with Moore and Ermold seeking damages for the initial refusal.
After lengthy litigation, a jury awarded $100,000 in damages. Davis was also required to pay $260,000 in attorney’s fees, according to her lawyers.
Davis then appealed, claiming that she should have been able to cite as a defense her right to the free exercise of religion under the Constitution’s First Amendment.
After losing an appeal at the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March this year, Davis turned to the Supreme Court, raising that question, as well as the much more contentious issue of whether Obergefell should be overturned.
While the Supreme Court has for now given no indication it would seek to overturn Obergefell, it has in other rulings in the last decade strengthened religious rights at the expense of LGBTQ rights, including by expanding the ability of people to seek exemptions from laws they object to because of their faith.
Are they just waiting for a better case to come along? That is the question from me and others. Only time will tell.
The other big headline is the end of the government shutdown. The circumstances surrounding the resolution are far from ideal. There are a large number of articles expressing anger and disgust at the actions of eight Democrats in cutting this deal. It’s quite challenging to keep up with the decline of the world’s once-great democracy. This is the headline from Politico‘s Katherine Tully-McManus. “The 8 Senate Democratic Caucus members who voted to end the shutdown. There are few obvious threads connecting the group who broke the partisan impasse.”
Eight members of the Senate Democratic Caucus broke ranks Sunday and voted to advance a deal to reopen the federal government.
That’s fewer than the 10 Democrats who broke ranks in March to advance a previous GOP-led stopgap funding bill — a move that sparked a huge backlash against Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
There are few obvious threads connecting the group who broke the partisan impasse this time. Some of them helped broker the agreement with Republicans over the opposition of Schumer and most other Democrats, who wanted a guaranteed extension for expiring federal health insurance subsidies.
Most, but not all, previously held state-level office — including four former governors. Most, but not all, come from presidential swing states. Two have announced they are retiring from the Senate after their current terms end, and two are senior members of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
None are up for reelection in 2026.
More on these eight senators at the link. There are numerous punditry thoughts on what is being called “The Great Cave-in.” This first take is from MSNBC’s Steve Benen. “As the Senate advances a plan to end the government shutdown, what happens now? As the shutdown continued, the pieces were in place for Democrats to stand firm in support of a popular cause. Eight senators folded anyway.”
As the ongoing government shutdown was poised to begin in late September, three members of the Senate Democratic caucus — Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman and Maine’s Angus King — broke party ranks and voted with the Republican majority to prevent the breakdown. That gave GOP leaders 55 votes, five short of the 60-vote threshold.
At that point, the Republican plan, in a nutshell, could be summarized in one word: wait.
GOP leaders, in the White House and on Capitol Hill, assumed that just enough Senate Democrats would cave under pressure. Those assumptions proved true. MSNBC reported overnight:
After nearly six weeks of a painful shutdown, a critical number of Senate Democrats backed a Republican funding bill to reopen government — with little to show for holding out so long. The breakthrough, which came together suddenly on day 40 of the shutdown, offers Democrats few new concessions beyond what Republicans had already proposed.
There’s quite a bit to this, so let’s unpack the details.
Is the shutdown over?
Not yet. The Sunday-night vote in the Senate was a procedural vote to advance a bill intended to end the shutdown. It received 60 votes, but the underlying legislation still needs to pass.
Who caved?
In addition to Cortez Masto, Fetterman and King, who’ve consistently voted with Republicans to end the shutdown, five other Senate Democrats sided with the GOP on the procedural vote: Dick Durbin of Illinois, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Jackie Rosen of Nevada and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. (Durbin and Shaheen, it’s worth noting for context, are retiring at the end of their current terms.) Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, meanwhile, voted with most Democrats against the package.
Did they get anything in exchange for their votes?
Not much. The deal, to the extent that it can fairly be described as such, includes three full-year appropriations bills to fund some federal departments through the end of the fiscal year and money to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It also reverses Donald Trump’s shutdown layoffs (also known as “reduction in force” notifications, or RIFs).
What about the Affordable Care Act, which was largely the point of the shutdown?
Republicans promised Democrats there will soon be a vote on extending the expiring ACA subsidies.
For health care advocates, does this offer some reason for hope?
Not really. Even if there is a vote, there’s no reason to assume it will pass the GOP-led chamber. And even if it were to pass, there’s no guarantee that the Republican-led House would care.
So why in the world did these eight senators cave?
According to King, it was time to surrender because the status quo “wasn’t working.”
This final analysis is by Sarah Ewall-Wice, writing at The Daily Beast. “Dems Skewer ‘Trainwreck’ Schumer for Caving Over Shutdown. WHAT THE CHUCK?! The Senate minority leader is facing calls to resign despite his “no” vote.”
Democrats from across the political spectrum are livid with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after a group of Senate Democrats caved and reached a deal with Republicans to end the government shutdown.
Schumer, 74, came out against the bipartisan plan and voted against moving it forward in the Senate on Sunday night.
However, eight Democrats joined Republicans in a 60-40 vote to proceed, sparking turmoil within the party.
“Tonight is another example of why we need new leadership. If @ChuckSchumer were an effective leader, he would have united his caucus to vote ‘No’ tonight and hold the line on healthcare,” wrote Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton, who is challenging Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey in the primary.
He called on Markey to join him in a pledge not to vote for Schumer as Senate leader.
Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz posted an image of Schumer photoshopped into the Amy Schumer movie ‘Trainwreck’ with the caption “Different Schumer, same title.”
“Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced,” wrote progressive Rep. Ro Khanna. “If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”
He replied that he was a “fan” of Sen. Chris Van Hollen in response to political commentator Krystal Ball’s suggestion that he should become the leader.
We know what or who the basic problem is. Who wouldn’t love a Substack titled “Are you f’ng kidding me?” That’s a daily question around here these days. This is the brainchild of JoJoFromJerz. The title is even hotter. “Portrait of a Man Who Doesn’t Give a Fuck. Starring: indifference, ego, and forty-two million people he is actively fighting to starve.” Yup, are president is the ultimate example of Anti-social Personality Disorder.” He comes replete with a lifetime of examples. And there’s that photo that keeps showing up everywhere, including this blog when I peeled it on Monday.
This photo should be hung in the Louvre of moral decay.
Look at it. The tableau is so absurd it feels storyboarded by Voldemort and Liberace’s real estate LLC. A man collapses on the floor where presidents once ended wars and launched moon missions. Now the room has all the gravitas of a Vegas timeshare bathroom, festooned with Chinese-made American flags marinated in Drakkar Noir. It’s as if history’s most consequential decisions are now being made in the world’s tackiest escape room.
Aides kneel. Hands reach. Chaos unfolds.
And Donald Trump just stands there — bored, irritated, visibly put-out — like the collapse in front of him is a personal scheduling conflict. His face isn’t concern. It is inconvenience.
His jaw hangs open in that dopey, defeated pout you only see when a chain-steakhouse diner learns their “Buy One Get One Ribeye” coupon expired yesterday. His eyes aren’t searching for a pulse; they’re searching for the nearest camera.
He’s not seeking help. He’s seeking a close-up.
If Dante were alive today, he wouldn’t write The Inferno. He’d pitch a reality show called Keeping Up With the Collapse and hiss to the crew, “We don’t need CGI. Just let him talk.”
The entire scene looks like Norman Rockwell painted The Death of Empathy, directed by Jeffrey Dahmer and executive produced by Satan. Hang this next to The Scream and the painting would lean over and whisper, Is that guy okay.
It feels like someone pitched, What if Succession had a baby with Idiocracy and then handed the baby the nuclear codes. It should not be funny. But it is. It should not be real. And yet here we are.
Because this photo is not merely symbolic of who he is.
This is who he is.
A convicted felon. Found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law. A man whose closest approximation to empathy is jabbing the close door button in an elevator while someone sprints toward it.
This is who Donald Trump is.
He doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but himself.
A man collapses behind him. Just as our country has been collapsing behind him for the entirety of this second so-called term.
And he doesn’t give a fuck.
He is not thinking, Is that man okay. He is thinking, How dare he steal my scene.
This is who Donald Trump is.
He doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but himself.
He isn’t numb to suffering—he feeds on it. Suffering is his currency, his spotlight, his scepter. Every ounce of pain around him inflates his sense of importance. He doesn’t create, build, or inspire; he only knows how to conquer by making others smaller, hungrier, emptier. His power is measured in what he can take away. He is a parasite of misery, thriving on the wounds he inflicts.
Go read the entire post. She’s right. He doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but himself. And here’s more evidence, as Trump pardons all of those election-denying cronies while possibly looking forward to handing one to that miserable sex-trafficking ghoul Gislane Maxwell. The first article comes from Politico‘s Kyle Cheney. “Trump pardons top allies who aided bid to subvert the 2020 election. Pardon recipients include Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman and dozens more.” I weep for justice in my country today.
President Donald Trump has pardoned a long list of prominent allies who backed his effort to subvert the 2020 election, according to Justice Department Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, who posted the relevant document Sunday night.
Among those who received the “full, complete and unconditional” pardons were Rudy Giuliani, who helped lead an effort to pressure state legislatures to reject Joe Biden’s victories in key swing states; Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff in 2020 and a crucial go-between for Trump and state officials; John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, two attorneys who helped devise a strategy to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021; Boris Epshteyn, a longtime Trump adviser; and Sidney Powell, a conservative attorney who launched a fringe legal assault on election results in key swing states.
The pardons are largely symbolic — none of those identified were charged with federal crimes. The document posted by Martin is also undated, so it’s unclear when Trump signed it. The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Giuliani, Eastman and Powell were among those identified by former special counsel Jack Smith as Trump’s co-conspirators, though he never brought charges against them. The pardons would preclude any future administration from potentially pursuing a criminal case against them.
The language of the pardon is broad, applying to “all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting activities, participation in or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of presidential electors … as well for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 presidential election.”
Though Trump has long insisted he has the power to pardon himself for federal crimes — an untested proposition — it appears he is not yet prepared to test that theory. Though the pardon document indicates it could apply to others who fit the same criteria, it explicitly excludes Trump.
In addition to his inner circle, Trump pardoned dozens of GOP activists who signed paperwork falsely claiming to be legitimate presidential electors, a key component of the bid to pressure Pence.
Regarding the potential pardon for Maxwell, this information comes from Scott MacFarlane of CBS News. “Ghislaine Maxwell plans to ask Trump to commute prison sentence, House Democrats say.”
Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking co-conspirator, is planning to apply for a commutation of her federal prison sentence, which is set to run through 2037, according to documents obtained by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee and seen by CBS News.
In a letter to President Trump on Monday, also seen by CBS News, Judiciary Committee Democrats wrote that Maxwell “is preparing a ‘Commutation Application’ for your Administration to review, undoubtedly coming to you for your direct consideration. The Warden herself is directly helping Ms. Maxwell copy, print, and send documents related to this application.”
The letter says the information received demonstrates “either that Ms. Maxwell is herself requesting you release her from her 20-year prison sentence for her role as a co-conspirator in Jeffrey Epstein’s international child sex trafficking ring, or that this child sex predator now holds such tremendous sway in the second Trump Administration that you and your DOJ will follow her clemency recommendations.”
The letter also alleges that Maxwell is receiving preferential and lenient treatment at the Bryan federal prison camp in Texas, where she was transferred over the summer after meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to discuss the Epstein case.
“Federal law enforcement staff working at the camp have been waiting on Ms. Maxwell hand and foot,” says the letter signed by Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
It appears that something needs to be done to address the fundamental nature of the Presidential Pardon. It’s supposed to be the last chance at justice for the wrongly accused. It was never supposed to be an article of power handed to an autocrat to rewrite the guilt and punishment of evil minions.
I’ve also been crying and listening to Warren Zevon songs since his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as featured on David Letterman. I love his lyrical melodies and his strong rhythms and beats. His lyrics tell stories that are both funny and sad, full of vivid characters. I have finally uncovered the underlying sadness behind most of his lyrics and can no longer unhear them. They’ve burrowed into my heart. And so, I cry, which is quite uncharacteristic for me. But then, it seems American life these days requires tears.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: Thank you for Your Attention to this Matter
Posted: November 7, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, 2024 Elections | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Ballot Initiatives, Dozing Don, Dozing Donnie, SNAP benefits, The Epstein Files, Trump family crime syndicate and grift rodeo 7 Comments
“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.
I noticed that Entertainment Weekly covered the story, but decided to go with The Independent instead.
A pharmaceutical executive collapsed in the Oval Office Thursday as members of the Trump administration were announcing a new deal for weight-loss medications.
The man was standing behind President Donald Trump during the event when his knees appeared to suddenly buckle underneath him. Reporters initially identified the man as Novo Nordisk executive Gordon Finlay however the company later denied that it was him.
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 Magazine as 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.
Now that a Federal Judge ordered the Trump administration to continue to pay SNAP benefits for the month of November, we see the usual Trump move. Take it to court. This is from the AP. “Trump administration seeks to block full SNAP payments for November.” Starving the elderly, children, and the poor is such a Republican Holiday Tradition!
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.”
Trump is right — but the 2025 Thanksgiving bundle is also smaller than the 2024 package.
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.
- Natalie Allison / Washington Post: Trump pardons former Tennessee House speaker, top aide awaiting prison
- Lindsay Whitehurst / Associated Press: Supreme Court lets Trump block transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers
- Regina Garcia Cano / Associated Press: Trump has accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuanced
- Politico: Senate sinks measure to block military action against Venezuela
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blog lists today?
Finally, Friday Reads: A Trumpy Halloween!
Posted: October 31, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, A Trumpy Halloween, CBS News Shake-up, Losing Democracy, Paramount, Senate Filibuster, Venezuela 9 Comments
“We are so blessed to have a businessman in charge.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Well, if you need to be scared out of your wits, no need to rewatch those Freddy Krueger Movies. Just pick up a newspaper or two and be prepared to be chilled to your bones, if the weather isn’t already doing that to you. I’m a lot on the late side today because Temple snuggled up so close to me last night she nearly shoved me off the bed several times. The furnace is already on, but I’ve also brought out the space heater to try to warm her up and then lower the temperature back to the foot of the bed.
It appears the New York Times may have gone woke. My jaw dropped reading the Editorial Board headline. Cue the Jaws Shark theme song.”Donald Trump has wielded power as no previous president has, often in open defiance of the law. His actions have raised a chilling question.” Oh, really? Finally, starting to notice that, are we? “Are We Losing Our Democracy?” (The link is shared for you to read.)
Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.
Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy, in the mold of Russia or China. But once countries begin taking steps away from democracy, the march often continues. We offer these 12 markers as a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.
The first section is on authoritarian speech, which seems a fitting place for reporters to start.
Authoritarian takeovers in the modern era often do not start with a military coup. They instead involve an elected leader who uses the powers of the office to consolidate authority and make political opposition more difficult, if not impossible. Think of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and, to lesser degrees, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India. These leaders have repressed dissent and speech in heavy-handed ways.
Over the past year, President Trump and his allies have impinged on free speech to a degree that the federal government has not since perhaps the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s. His administration pressured television stations to stop airing Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show when Mr. Kimmel criticized Trump supporters after the murder of Charlie Kirk; revoked the visas of foreign students for their views on the war in Gaza; and ordered investigations of liberal nonprofit groups. Mr. Trump so harshly criticizes people who disagree with him, including federal judges, that they become targets of harassment from his supporters.
The Bottom Line
Many forms of speech and dissent remain vibrant in the United States. But the president has tried to dull them. His evident goal is to cause Americans to fear they will pay a price for criticizing him, his allies, or his agenda.
Emily Atkin has a blog post up at HEATED describing the incredible firings of reporters at CBS News who were covering Climate Change. “The fall of the CBS News climate team. David Ellison, the new pro-Trump chief executive of Paramount Skydance, has dismantled the best climate change reporting team in cable news.”
As Hurricane Melissa raced toward Jamaica on Monday, CBS News senior coordinating producer Tracy Wholf sent an email to the newsroom, detailing the historic storm’s scientific connection to climate change.
In the message obtained by HEATED, Wholf explained how an overly-hot Atlantic Ocean supercharged Melissa, fueling its rapid 70-mph intensification in a single day, boosting winds by about 10 mph, and turning what might have been a category 4 storm into a category 5. Wholf suggested a simple sentence CBS News reporters could use in storm-related stories to make the connection.
Wholf usually sent emails like this in the wake of deadly extreme weather events, two CBS News staffers told HEATED. But it was the first such email Wholf had sent under the company’s new pro-Trump billionaire chief executive David Ellison, and its new anti-“woke” editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.
It was also the last. Two days later, as Hurricane Melissa smashed into the Caribbean, Wholf was laid off, along with the majority of the five person team supporting CBS News’s climate coverage.
Today, the only person remaining at CBS News to cover climate change is national environmental correspondent David Schechter, who no longer has a dedicated producer. In addition to Wholf’s layoff, two producers supporting the climate team were let go, and another dedicated climate producer was reassigned.
The cuts were part of a larger layoff on Wednesday that affected nearly 100 other CBS News staffers, including the network’s race and culture team, and around 1,000 staffers across newly-merged parent company Paramount Skydance.
Two days ago, CNN reported on other areas that have lost staff, which may be seen as areas that likely offend Trump, as Paramount Skydance plans more mergers. Under any functional Justice Department, these mergers would be viewed as leading to excessive concentration in a single industry. A high concentration of markets is non-competitive and detrimental to the economy and consumers. There are numerous laws, starting with the Sherman Act, that block such mergers. Brian Stelter reports that “Paramount begins steep layoffs as David Ellison reshapes the media giant.”
The new Paramount is laying off about 10% of its workforce, achieving some of the cost savings that CEO David Ellison promised investors when he took charge of the media company over the summer.
Many divisions of Paramount Skydance will be impacted, from the iconic movie studio to CBS News to Comedy Central.
About a thousand jobs are expected to be cut this week, and another thousand in the near future, as a new management team reorganizes the company.
Ellison, who headed the production company Skydance and merged it with the much larger Paramount, said in a memo on Wednesday morning that “these steps are necessary to position Paramount for long-term success.”
“In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization,” he said. “In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth.”
Steep cuts and sweeping changes are common after mergers, but Paramount has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years, so employees have been especially on edge about this fall’s expected terminations.
At CBS News, nearly 100 positions will be eliminated, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on condition of anonymity.
The person said the CBS News cuts were already in the works before Ellison appointed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief earlier this month, following the purchase of her startup outlet, The Free Press.
The reorganization comes as the wider media industry waits to see Ellison’s ambitious plans for Paramount. In recent weeks Ellison has been pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of CNN, HBO Max and the Warner Bros. studio.
The WBD board has rebuffed those initial offers and started a strategic review, which could result in a sale of the entire company, a continuation of the current plan to split WBD into two, or some other outcome.
The impact on reporting and free expression could be huge.
There are indications that “U.S. poised to strike military targets in Venezuela in escalation against Maduro regime.” This is reported by Antonio Maria Delgado writing for the Miami Herald.”
The Trump Administration has made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment, sources with knowledge of the situation told the Miami Herald, as the U.S. prepares to initiate the next stage of its campaign against the Soles drug cartel. The planned attacks, also reported by the Wall Street Journal, will seek to destroy military installations used by the drug-trafficking organization the U.S. says is headed by Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and run by top members of his regime.
Sources told the Herald that the targets — which could be struck by air in a matter of days or even hours — also aim to decapitate the cartel’s hierarchy. U.S. officials believe the cartel exports around 500 tons of cocaine yearly, split between Europe and the United States.
While sources declined to say whether Maduro himself is a target, one of them said his time is running out. “Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to,” the source said. “What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming.”
Well, aren’t we the rogue nation now? The Associated Press reports that the “UN human rights chief says US strikes on alleged drug boats are ‘unacceptable’.”
The U.N. human rights chief said Friday that U.S. military strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean allegedly carrying illegal drugs from South America are “unacceptable” and must stop.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, called for an investigation into the strikes, in what appeared to mark the first such condemnation of its kind from a United Nations organization.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for Türk’s office, relayed his message Friday at a regular U.N. briefing: “These attacks and their mounting human cost are unacceptable. The U.S. must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats.”
She said Türk believed “airstrikes by the United States of America on boats in the Caribbean and in the Pacific violate international human rights law.”
President Donald Trump has justified the attacks on the boats as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States, but the campaign against drug cartels has been divisive among countries in the region.
Orange Caligula is insisting that the United States Senate nix the Filibuster. This is reported by Politico. “Republicans quickly push back on Trump’s call to nix filibuster. Both Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson poured cold water on the idea Friday.” We’ll have to see if the two leaders will hold to that.
Republicans are quickly tamping down President Donald Trump’s call to eliminate the Senate filibuster as they try to keep pressure on Democrats to end the 31-day government shutdown.
GOP leaders believed Thursday they were on track to reopen agencies as soon as next week. Then Trump threw a fresh complication into their laps overnight when he revived calls for Republicans to invoke the “nuclear option” and eliminate the 60-vote threshold for passing most legislation. Without it, Republican senators could reopen the government on their own.
But many GOP senators have vocally defended the filibuster, including Majority Leader John Thune, calling the 60-vote rule a fundamental feature of the Senate and one that works to conservatives’ benefit in the long run.
Thune has defended the filibuster multiple times during the shutdown, calling it a “bad idea” to suggest eliminating it. “The 60-vote threshold has protected this country,” he said earlier this month.
More news on Epstein is keeping the scandals on the front page. This is from The Independent, as reported by Harry Cockburn. “JPMorgan Chase alerted Trump admin to over $1B in ‘suspicious’ transactions involving Epstein and prominent Wall Street figures: report Over 4,700 transactions, including wire transfers to Russian banks raised red flags in 2019, new documents reveal.”
Just weeks after Jeffrey Epstein died in jail in 2019, banking giant JPMorgan Chase alerted the Trump administration to more than $1 billion in potentially suspicious transactions involving several high-profile U.S. business figures, as well as wire transfers to Russian banks.
The report, which JPMorgan filed – and which was released this week among hundreds of pages of previously sealed court records – flagged over 4,700 transactions, amid concerns they could potentially be related to human trafficking operations involving Epstein.
Among the names highlighted in JPMorgan’s suspicious activity report are: Leon Black, co-founder of private equity firm Apollo Global Management and former MoMA chairman; billionaire hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin; celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz; and trusts linked to retail magnate Leslie Wexner.
Though each man appeared in connection with financial dealings tied to Epstein, what those transactions involved, and precisely how Epstein fits into the picture, remains unclear. None of them has been charged with crimes in connection with the disgraced financier.
According to The New York Times, which – alongside The Wall Street Journal – requested the documents to be made public, the report alerted authorities to wire transfers to Russian banks, while also mentioning sensitivities surrounding Epstein’s “relationships with two U.S. presidents.” Epstein is known to have been close to President Trump and former President Bill Clinton.
The report offered few specifics about the suspicious transactions or why they raised red flags, other than their apparent ties to Epstein.
Key points it highlights include $65 million worth of wire transfers linked to trusts controlled by retail billionaire Wexner. The transfers, dating back to the mid-2000s, appeared to pass through multiple banks.
Epstein served as a trustee for some of Wexner’s trusts and acted as a close financial adviser for nearly 20 years.
Julia Ainsley has the Halloween Cruelty story at NBC News. “‘Happy Halloween!’: DHS spokeswoman responds to report of immigration agents wearing horror masks in L.A.. The story by a local news site featured images posted to social media showing what the outlet says were agents in unmarked cars donning Chucky and Momo masks.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman offered a two-word reply Friday in response to a local news report that said immigration agents were seen wearing Halloween masks in the Los Angeles area.
“Happy Halloween!” DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin wrote to NBC News when asked about the report.
The story by the local news site LA Taco featured images posted to social media showing what the outlet says were agents in unmarked cars donning Chucky and Momo masks. It said a member of the Harbor Area Peace Patrol, which monitors federal activity in the area, spotted the vehicle with the Momo mask-wearing driver at an immigration raid on Tuesday.
An activist with Harbor Area Peace Patrol told NBC News that he observed cars previously used on immigration raids leaving an ICE staging area on Tuesday, as they typically do ahead of raids. Two people in the cars were wearing masks – one Momo, the other Chucky.
“We are out there six days a week,” said the activist, who only wanted to be identified as Victor. “We take pictures of the cars as they leave. We put information out for the community to be aware.”
Between this immigration nightmare, the incredibly increasing costs of health insurance and food, and the lack of any nutrition support to many families, I think this will be the scariest Thanksgiving ever.
Additionally, Thanksgiving may have few tangible blessings to be thankful for. It’s time we stand up against deliberate cruelty and exploitation.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: Exponential Insanity
Posted: October 27, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked, American Fascists, Corruption and Criminal Insanity, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, Polycrisis | Tags: #FARTUS Mafia State, FARTUS 12 Comments
“No one said it would be easy.” John Buss, @Repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Once again, we’ve been treated to the overtly unconstitutional view that Orange Caligula can run for a third term. Somehow, Steve Bannon managed to get airtime again, and the legacy media has gone wild with speculation. We’re also listening to more insane chatter about how mentally “healthy” #FARTUS is now that he’s had a supposed MRI at Walter Reed. All of these sideshows are undoubtedly trying to get the focus off the Epstein files, bombing hapless fishermen off coasts in South America, and the incredible price inflation in food, gasoline, and everything.
Can you believe this is our reality now? Here’s the headline from the New York Times from the story by Katie Rogers. “Trump Says a Recent M.R.I. Scan Was ‘Perfect,’ and He’d ‘Love’ a Third Term. President Trump made the comments on the second day of his trip to Asia. The Constitution limits presidents to two terms, but Mr. Trump has suggested he might try to circumvent it.”
President Trump said that he underwent magnetic resonance imaging earlier this month, telling reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday that the results had been “perfect” but declining to say why his doctors had ordered the scan.
Mr. Trump also reiterated that he was interested in serving a third term, saying that he “would love to do it” because of his popularity with his supporters. Mr. Trump, who spoke to journalists for about 30 minutes on a flight to Tokyo from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during his almost weeklong trip to Asia, seemed intent on presenting himself as fit to lead, if not run for the presidency again.
The Constitution sets a two-term limit for presidents, but Mr. Trump and his supporters have increasingly floated the possibility of finding a way to circumvent the 22nd Amendment, which states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice,” regardless of whether the terms are consecutive.
In discussing his health, Mr. Trump offered a small new detail about the tests that the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, said the president had received during a recent visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
“I gave you the full results,” Mr. Trump said, mischaracterizing the summary that was released by his physician. The summary did not say that Mr. Trump had an M.R.I. scan and had few details on what testing the president had undergone. When asked why he had undergone an M.R.I., the president said, “you could ask the doctors.” Magnetic resonance imaging, a noninvasive technology that creates detailed images of the inside of the body, is often used for disease detection and monitoring, or to detect bone or joint abnormalities.
At 79, Mr. Trump is the oldest person to be elected president, and he would be well into his 80s by the end of his second term. Mr. Trump’s critics have speculated about his health in recent months after he repeatedly appeared on camera with bruises on the back of his hand and swollen ankles.
Even the ladies on the view have a better handle on this nonsense than most of the news media. This is from MediaITE. “Trump’s 3rd Term Flirtation Triggers Five-Alarm Panic on The View: ‘Damn if He Isn’t a Dictator!’” I wouldn’t be so damned worried about this if it weren’t for the corrupt Supreme Court.
The co-hosts of The View sounded a full five-alarm warning on Monday over President Donald Trump’s musings about running for an unconstitutional third term.
Whoopi Goldberg began Monday’s show by declaring, “Well, you-know-who told us he was going to be a dictator on day one and, damn, if he isn’t a dictator!”
Goldberg referred to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s claim that Trump is “going to get a third term.”
On Air Force One on his way to Japan Monday, Trump gave a nebulous answer to a reporter’s question about whether he would pursue a third term.
“Am I not ruling it out? I mean, you’ll have to tell me,” Trump said.
Alyssa Farah Griffin said, “There’s certain people in Trump’s orbit who, when they tell you what they’re going to do, I listen. And I would put Steve Bannon on the top of the list. He has been one of the most senior advisers to Trump the first time he ran, predicted the events around January 6th, the efforts to overturn the election. And I feel crazy because I feel like a conspiracy theorist talking about this!”
Sunny Hostin said that Trump’s ballroom project indicates that he doesn’t plan to leave the White House.
“He is hooking up the White House because he doesn’t plan on leaving it. I don’t think he plans on leaving,” Hostin said.
“I told y’all that years ago, that he had — he was not going anywhere,” Goldberg added. “He said it. He said, ‘I want to be president for life.’ I heard him say it, I watched his lips move, and I thought, he means this!”
Ana Navarro claimed, “This is a guy who has got authoritarian envy. He goes around to these countries and he loves — he wants the parades, he wants the arches, he wants the ballrooms, he wants to be an emperor, he wants to be an authoritarian. Paying no attention to the Constitution, that’s the way Ortega does it, the way Chavez did it, the way Maduro does it, Putin does it.”
Perhaps we need a national GoFundMe for relieving Trump of his duties due to mental deficiencies. I always look to Ruth Ben-Ghiat for some rational and data-based explanations of our situation. Her blog, Lucid, is a very good place to start. “TINA (There Is No Alternative) and the Leader as “A Vehicle of Divine Providence, and my video on covering corruption and violence with an aura of holiness.” If there ever is a fascist movement, you can rely on the hyper-religious to be behind it.In January 2016, when I forecast that Donald Trump would develop a formidable personality cult along the lines of Vladimir Putin’s and Silvio Berlusconi’s if he won the GOP presidential nomination, people called me an idiot and a clown. But Trump has developed a leader cult that conforms to my description from nine years ago:
Here’s the trick to cults of personality: the leader has to embody the people but also stand above them. He must appear ordinary, to allow people to relate to him. And yet he must also be seen as extraordinary, so that people will grant him permission to be the arbiter of their individual and national destiny.
Autocrats are always looking over their shoulders for rivals, and the claim of uniqueness is also designed to insulate the leader from the idea that others could do or have done his job better. It also silences dreaded talk of successors.
The history of autocrats suggests that the more corrupt, violent, and hated they become, the more they use TINA messaging as they seek to stay in office indefinitely. In 2008, when Putin was still consolidating his power, he agreed to have someone else (Dmitry Medvedev) serve as president, while he served as prime minister, due to a constitutional ban on an individual serving three consecutive terms. By 2020, following the large 2019 public protests over corrupted Moscow elections, vacating the presidency was no longer an option. So Putin staged a referendum to amend the constitution to stay in power until 2036. His argument? That looking for successors would jeopardize the stability that only he could offer.
Americans got a taste of TINA messaging on Oct. 19, the day after an estimated 7 million people participated in No Kings protests. Trump responded by posting an AI-edited video that advocates for him staying in office in 2036, 2048, and…forever (“Trump4Eva”).
There is no better way to give TINA traction than to proclaim the leader as in office by the will of God and spin his every action as the fruit of divine intention. This idea has the most credibility if religious leaders circulate it. Dictator Benito Mussolini, an atheist, knew this: he made the Lateran Accords with the Catholic Church and was rewarded by Pope Pius XI proclaiming him to be a “man of Providence.”
I really don’t want to be making you have nightmares tonight, but there needs to be some bud-nipping about his virality, sanity, and a third term right now. I’m getting tired of propaganda driving decisions for this country. Here’s some more news that should make you shiver. This is from AXIOS and written by Emily Peck. “The economy is in uncharted territory.” Literally.
Data went dark this month. The government shutdown is halting the collection and release of statistics tracking the job market, public health and crop production, as well as other economic indicators.
Why it matters: The numbers are critical for understanding what’s happening in the U.S., particularly at a moment of rapid change in both government policies and in the job market.
How it works: Businesses use gold-standard government data, like the jobs report, to set wages and make hiring, pricing and investment decisions.
- Investors watch the numbers so closely that they can drive big stock reactions. Policymakers use the data to set minimum wage standards and increase food assistance or other important benefits.
Where it stands: Since the shutdown began on Oct. 1, government agencies have stopped collecting or releasing information about:
The labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics didn’t release a September employment report and hasn’t collected any data in October.
- We don’t know the unemployment rate or how many jobs businesses are creating. Few companies appear to be hiring, and job anxiety is skyrocketing.
Public health. Weekly numbers that track how many Americans are coming down with the flu, RSV or COVID-19 haven’t been updated.
- Local governments, doctors and Americans are in the dark about illnesses that lead to hospitalizations and the deaths of tens of thousands every year just as respiratory virus season typically kicks up.
Agriculture. The USDA’s weekly export sales report and daily sales announcements, and its monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates aren’t coming out. Farmers and commodity traders are left with little information at the peak of the harvest season and at a time when tariffs are driving much angst, Reuters reports.
Demographic information. The 2024 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample was supposed to be released on Oct. 16.
- It’s one of the few publicly available datasets that allows for measurement of economic, demographic and housing trends across small geographic areas and small population subgroups.
Between the lines: This isn’t an all-inclusive list.
- And though these should be temporary stops, there is other data that the Trump administration has walked away from permanently: on food insecurity and weather disasters.
Reality check: Some information was too important to skip. On Friday, the BLS released its Consumer Price Index, covering inflation in September — a measure tied to Social Security’s Cost of Living Adjustment, which the government said would be 2.8% next year.
- But no data on October has been collected.
This is no way to run a modern economy. We’re now on the IMF warning list. This is via MSN but originally published at Euronews. “US borrowing expected to rival Europe’s most indebted states, says IMF.” This story is reported by Una Hajdari.
Global public debt is rising faster than at any point in modern history, and this time, it is not just the historically large spenders driving it.
The International Monetary Fund’s latest Fiscal Monitor warns that the public finances of major powers, led by the United States, have become a systemic global risk.
“Although the number of countries with debt above 100% will be steadily declining in the next five years, their share in world GDP is projected to rise,” the report stated.
This means that the collective or “global public debt is projected to rise above 100% of world GDP by 2029,” it said. In such a scenario, public debt would be at its highest level since 1948.
According to IMF calculations, this trajectory “reflects a higher and steeper path than projected before the pandemic”, signalling that governments have failed to stabilise their debt despite the recovery of global growth.
The US marks the steepest rise
The United States will see the steepest increase among major advanced economies when it comes to debt-to-GDP ratio, according to the IMF.
From 2023 to 2030, general government gross debt will climb from 119.8% of GDP in 2023 to 143.4% in 2030.
The institution noted that the United States will, for the first time this century, surpass Italy and Greece on this front — long viewed as the developed world’s most indebted states.
I’m not the least bit a deficit hawk, but this is really not good. You may read the analysis at the link.
This is from Mehdi’s Monday morning round-up, which can be found at the above Bluesky link.
Who was the president of the United States in 2020? Donald Trump, right? Obviously. We all know that.
Except perhaps… Donald Trump himself. For years now, Trump and his supporters have bizarrely behaved as if the first Trump presidency ended in 2019. They like to brag about the amazing state of the economy in 2019, while ignoring the soaring unemployment they left behind at the end of 2020. They complain about the COVID lockdowns in 2020, as if the president behind the lockdowns wasn’t… Donald John Trump.
On Friday, Trump went one step further. In fact, the president took a full step right into Crazytown with this post on his Truth Social website:
Got that? The president of the United States thinks ex-Special Counsel Jack Smith and former Biden DOJ alums Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco “cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election.” Back in 2020, to be clear, Merrick Garland was an appeals court judge, Lisa Monaco was a lawyer in private practice, and Jack Smith was the chief prosecutor at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
How, then, did they “rig” the 2020 election when they weren’t in government? Or did they, upon joining the Biden administration in 2021 and 2022, take a time machine and travel back in time to November 2020?
I mean, how is this not completely and utterly deranged from Trump? How are we not in 25th Amendment territory? Nothing Joe Biden ever said, even in that car-crash 2024 televised presidential debate, comes close to this unhinged nonsense from the sitting president.
And, on Saturday, the mad king in the White House took a further step into Crazytown. He increased tariffs on Canada by 10% over current levels because – I kid you not – the Canadians hurt his feelings with a television ad. Yes, really!
“Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” he declaimed on – where else? – Truth Social, adding: “The sole purpose of this FRAUD was Canada’s hope that the United States Supreme Court will come to their ‘rescue’ on Tariffs that they have used for years to hurt the United States.”
How is this not a parody? How is this even legal? Does this sound like a sufficient national security argument for Trump bypassing congressional authority on tariffs? American families will now have to pay even more in taxes – as that is what tariffs are! – because their president got really mad over a foreign television ad. An ad which, as the New York Times pointed out, “faithfully reproduces Reagan’s words” from 1987, in which the Gipper denounced tariffs.
On Sunday, the King of Crazytown continued his demented and dangerous all-caps ranting online, insisting pregnant women not take Tylenol unless “ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY” and telling parents to avoid the MMR shot.
None of this is remotely normal. There is a clear mental health crisis going on in the Oval Office right now. He is detached from reality. Every politician and pundit, every journalist in the White House press corps, knows this. It should be the biggest story in our media.
But, shamefully, it isn’t.
I so miss Mehdi and Joy! I’m glad they can be found writing important things like this while the old school media folds to the Trump Regime like paper airplanes from Qatar.
Anyway, that’s enough depressing us for one day.
Is he dead yet?
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: Proving us Right
Posted: October 20, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, Broligarchy, No Kings, Ukraine, White Christian Nationalism | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Corrupt DOJ, Heather Cox Richardson, No Kings Day protests, Paul Krugman, Paul Waldman, Ukraine 5 Comments
“Pfft… don’t tell me chemtrails aren’t real.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
All you have to do is to take a look at Orange Caligula’s response to the 7 million plus Americans letting them know how much he sucks to figure out how deeply we owned his thoughts on Saturday. He had no fake military birthday parade to distract him for this one. The headlines in the legacy media were so overtly blasé that you got a true sense of how deeply they’ve sucked the last decade. The problem is we might be living rentfree in his mind, but he’s still held up in the White House turning it into a mid-century modern whore house.
So, let’s go find the consensus among the public intellectuals who don’t worry about the threats of law suits and shutdowns to their bottom lines. Paul Waldman provides this analysis over at Public Notice. “No Kings was a huge success. Just look at Trump’s response. Turnout was enormous. There was no violence. And the wannabe king is triggered.”
There were some immediate attempts to simply dismiss the No Kings protests; White House spokespeople asked by journalists about the event responded “Who cares?” But President Trump cares very, very much.
The Republican Party has increasingly come to define itself by what and whom it hates. If some new issue bursts into public awareness, they won’t know what they think until they find out what position Democrats were taking so they can take the opposite one. They’re anti-anti-racism, and anti-anti-climate change, and all it takes to get them to denounce something is to tell them liberals like it. They’ll even get worked up about a corporate logo if a bunch of bots tell them it’s woke, apparently because the Founding Fathers would never have stood for sans serif fonts.
So calling this event (and the larger movement it seeks to create) “No Kings” turns out to have been a stroke of genius, because Trump’s response was to essentially say Yeah, I’m the king — and because I’m the king, I can poop on people!
After so many years one would think he had lost the ability to shock, but no — generative AI slop tools give Trump a whole new way to act like a petulant toddler:
Yes, the president of the United States posted a video showing him wearing a crown and pooping on crowds of Americans. Whether you think this is evidence of rapidly advancing dementia or just a new expression of the same vulgar and juvenile impulses Trump has always had, there is no universe in which posting a video like that one is politically beneficial for him.
“The rule of kings is bad and just what America was created to reject” is a pretty fundamental American idea. But in the world of today’s Republican Party, if Donald Trump says kings are good and it’s good that he’s a king, everyone else in the party is required to agree.
Economist and former NYT’s columnist Dr. Paul Krugman had similar thoughts. He freely writes them now on his SubStack. “Civil Resistance Confronts the Autocracy. While MAGA’s spin was both insane and revealing, the No Kings Day 2 Marches were a major step towards taking our country back.”
Last Saturday’s No Kings Day 2 was awesome to behold. The very best of America shone through. From coast to coast, in big cities and small, in red states as well as blue states, Americans peacefully marched to uphold our humanity as a country and to show our solidarity against autocracy and lawlessness.
And also awesome were the right-wing attacks on Kings Day 2 participants in the days before the rallies. They were so extreme and so unhinged, so utterly disconnected from reality, that they defeated their ostensible purpose of intimidating the marchers into silence. While the rest of us saw families, old people, young people, folks in funny costumes, many of them waving the Stars and Stripes, MAGA saw criminals and America-haters.
But I have a theory about the deeper purpose of the MAGA attacks on No Kings Day 2. America, I’d argue, is currently operating in a strange condition — what I would call a “bubble autocracy.” Donald Trump has not yet consolidated anything like absolute political power. But parts of our society — the Republican Party and a number of supposedly independent institutions like, say, CBS — are in effect living inside a bubble in which they operate as if he has. Within that bubble, a cult of personality around Trump has been built, a cult of personality worthy of Kim Jong Un. And to show their fealty to Dear Leader, Republicans must engage in bizarre rhetoric.
Before I explain my theory of how the right lost its mind, some personal observations.
I attended Saturday’s No Kings Day march in Manhattan, for several reasons. As a citizen, I felt it was my duty. As a journalist, I wanted to see with my own eyes the mood, and whether there was violence either by or, far more likely, against the protestors. And I was, to be honest, feeling some anxiety about crowd size: a disappointing turnout would have been a significant blow to our chances of saving American democracy. No surprise that Trump attempted to discourage participation by declaring in advance that “I hear that very few people are going to be there,” while his lackeys spouted insane conspiracy theories.
I needn’t have worried. The march I joined was immense. G. Elliott Morris and the independent science newsroom Xylon estimate that 320,000 people protested in New York, and their median estimate is that more than 5 million protested nationwide. As Morris says, Saturday’s events were very likely “the biggest single-day protest since 1970.” Furthermore, the event was completely nonviolent: The New York Police Department reported zero arrests.
As for me, I’ll stop wearing my No Kings T-shirt when some one pries it from my cold back or when Heather Cox Richardson tells me I can retire it. This is from her Sunday Substack, Letters from an American.”
A video of Trump in a bomber attacking American cities carries an implied threat that the disdain of throwing excrement doesn’t erase. This morning, Trump reinforced that threat when he reminded Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo: “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act. Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that’s unquestioned power. I choose not to, I’d rather do this, but I’m met constantly by fake politicians, politicians that think that, that you know they it’s not like a part of the radical left movement to have safety. These cities have to be safe.”
That “safety” apparently involves detaining U.S. citizens without due process. On Thursday, Nicole Foy of ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents. She reports they “have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”
On Friday, the Trump administration pushed its attempt to use the military in Democratic-led cities, asking the Supreme Court to let it deploy troops in Chicago immediately. Chris Geidner of Law Dork notes that four judges, two appointed by Democrats and two appointed by Republicans, have rejected the administration’s arguments for why they must send in troops. Now the Department of Justice has appealed to the Supreme Court, asking for a decision on the so-called shadow docket, which would provide a fast response, but one without any hearings or explanation.
The administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court warned that there was “pressing risk of violence” in Chicago—a premise the judges rejected—and said preventing Trump from going into the city “improperly impinges on the President’s authority.”How much difference will the No Kings Day protests, even as big as they were, make in the face of the administration’s attempt to get rid of our democratic political system and replace it with authoritarianism? What good is an inflatable frog against federal agents?
Scholar of social movements Lisa Corrigan noted that large, fun marches full of art and music expand connections and make people more willing to take risks against growing state power. They build larger communities by creating new images that bring together recognizable images from the past in new ways, helping more people see themselves in such an opposition. The community and good feelings those gatherings develop help carry opposition through hard moments. Corrigan notes, too, that yesterday “every single rally (including in the small towns) was bigger than the surrounding police force available. That kind of image event is VERY IMPORTANT if you’re…demonstrating social coherence AGAINST a fascist government and its makeshift gestapo.”
It’s funny how that AI-generated Trump video had nothing intelligent but everything artificial in it. Notice that he gets to reach altitude with nothing covering his face,nose, and barely his mouth. He managed to look like a toddly with a sippy cup urinal. Alan Elrod–writing for Liberal Currents–has this to say about the increasingly isolated Republican Party. He presents an analsyis of what we’ve learned about those gross Young Republican chat logs. We always knew the incels would be the last to leave and failures with the lead. “Sex Is Gay, Rape Is Epic, No Fatties: Young Right-Wing Men Are Obsessed With Male Power and Male Bodies. The group chat leak reveals what over a decade of incel messaging and Bronze Age Pervert have done to Young Republicans.”
It’s tempting to shrug off the language in the Young Republicans’ group chat as the pathetic humor of pasty losers. But the danger is real. As Bates stresses, we have seen incel ideology drive heinous acts of public violence, most notably in the cases of Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista and the Toronto van attack committed by Alek Minassian. As Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an expert on right-wing extremism and terroristic violence, argues in her new book Man Up: The New Misogyny & The Rise of Violent Extremism:
Such violence is also fueled by the constant dehumanization of women online, along with the casual celebration of violence and harassment directed toward them. One of the neo-Nazi men arrested for plotting an antisemitic attack in New York City in 2022 had previously shared online that he had violently attacked a transgender person and described himself as “most proud of being ‘good at raping women,’ ” according to an assistant district attorney on the case.
In other cases, women are not just targeted with rage as a means of punishment; they are attacked violently as a strategy of elimination. The six Asian women and two others gunned down in a rampage at three Atlanta massage parlors in the spring of 2021 were killed because the 21-year-old gunman believed he deserved to live in a world without the sexual temptation he believed they created for him. It’s hard to think of a clearer example of how mass violence can be generated from a sense of entitlement and male supremacist reasoning. Violent attacks against women in cases like these—as well as in domestic and intimate partner violence and misogynist incel attacks—are not only or even primarily about sex. Rather, they are rooted in what Kate Manne describes as “some men’s toxic sense of entitlement to have people look up to them steadfastly, with a loving gaze, admiringly-and to target and even destroy those who fail, or refuse, to do so.”Supremacy is an all-consuming logic on the MAGA right today. Christian supremacy, white supremacy, male supremacy, almost every corner of MAGA is marked by one or some combination of supremacist logic and a desire to subjugate some other group. This fixation on domination is precisely why I argued back in March that Andrew Tate has natural appeal to many younger Republicans and that rape as an ordering principle defines MAGA politics.
Here’s something scary from CNN to think on with Halloween on the Horizon. “Federal agency overseeing US nuclear stockpile will furlough most of its workforce starting Monday.”
The federal agency responsible for overseeing and modernizing the US nuclear stockpile will furlough the vast majority of its staff Monday as the government shutdown drags on, according to the Department of Energy.
About 1,400 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, will receive furlough notices Monday, while fewer than 400 employees will remain on the job to safeguard the stockpile, Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich told CNN.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright will speak about the shutdown’s impact on the US’ nuclear deterrent efforts Monday while visiting the Nevada National Security Site.
The NNSA Office of Secure Transportation, which oversees the transportation of nuclear weapons around the country, will be funded through October 27.
And remember all that talk of Peace before some one else got the Nobel Prize? This is from the Washington Post. “In tense meeting, Trump told Zelensky to concede land, meet Putin’s demands. Following the trip to Washington, Zelensky has set up a series of calls and meetings with his main European backers.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is rallying the support of his European partners after a bruising meeting with President Donald Trump, in which he was told to make concessions to end the war or risk facing destruction at the hands of Russia.
In a tense meeting at the White House on Friday, Trump tossed aside maps of the front line and urged Kyiv to concede its entire Donbas region to Russia to clinch a deal, according to people familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive diplomacy.
“He said [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will destroy you if you don’t agree now,” one of the people said. “Zelensky had his maps and everything, and he was explaining it to him but [Trump] wanted nothing to do with it.”
Trump listened but was not responsive to the Ukrainian message, the person said. “It was pretty much like ‘No, look guys, you can’t possibly win back any territory. … There is nothing we can do to save you. You should try to give diplomacy another chance.’”
So much success! So much winning! How can we even wrap our minds around it? And what about this story on Justice Bondi-style? This is from CBS’ Scott Pelley. The interview came from Sixty Minutes last night.
Erez Reuveni, a fired Department of Justice lawyer who’s now blowing the whistle, says he witnessed a disregard of due process and for the rule of law at the DOJ.
Reuveni previously won commendations for his work and was so effective defending President Trump’s first-term immigration policy that he was promoted quickly in Mr. Trump’s second term. But he says he was put on leave and then fired after refusing to sign a brief in the mistaken deportation case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Reuveni’s whistleblower disclosure helped highlight a growing concern in many courts across the country that the Justice Department is allegedly abusing the limits of the law.
“I took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. And my view of that oath is that I need to speak up and draw attention to what has happened to the department, what is happening to the rule of law,” Reuveni said. “I would not be faithfully abiding by my oath if I stayed silent right now.”
…
When more facts were known about the weekend flights, it turned out a Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported by mistake.
While people deported in error are normally returned, Reuveni said that in a phone call from a superior, he was ordered to argue that Abrego Garcia was an MS-13 member and a terrorist to prevent his return.
“I respond up the chain of command, no way. That is not correct. That is not factually correct. It is not legally correct. That is, that is a lie. And I cannot sign my name to that brief,” Reuveni said.
Reuveni said what was important was not whether or not Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 or a terrorist, but whether or not he received due process.
“What’s to stop them if they decide they don’t like you anymore, to say you’re a criminal, you’re a member of MS-13, you’re a terrorist,” Reuveni said. “What’s to stop them from sending in some DOJ attorney at the direction of DOJ leadership to delay, to filibuster, and if necessary, to lie? And now that’s you gone and your liberties changed.”
Reuveni was fired after refusing to sign a brief that called Abrego Garcia a terrorist. In June, he filed a whistleblower complaint with the help of attorneys from the Government Accountability Project.
While, the news still doesn’t feel like we’re living in America, the streets are begining to fill with enough Americans dedicated to truth, justice, and our evolving society, I have hope.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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