There’s not a lot of exciting politics news today; and that is probably a good thing, considering how bad things are looking for the country in the long run. We only have a little more than a month until Trump moves into the White House and tries to become president for life.
Have you heard the latest gossip? Donald Trump, Jr., who is still engaged to Kimberly Guilfoyle, has a new girlfriend.
Is there trouble in paradise for one of America’s most unsettling couples? Sure seems like it. Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle may be on the rocks, if the Daily Mail is to be believed. While the fiancés were spotted together about a week after the election, the tabloid has been all over what looks like Don Jr.’s new relationship with Bettina Anderson, a Republican socialite who lives in Florida. So what’s going on here?
Let’s back up a few months. In September, the Daily Mail reported that Don Jr. and Anderson had been “spotted canoodling” during a brunch date the month prior. According to their sources, this new fling was “the talk of Palm Beach.” One source said that Anderson reached over “to plant a sexy kiss” on Don Jr. three times during their meal at the Honor Bar.
“She seemed totally smitten with Don — and he with her,” the source told the Daily Mail.
Bettina Anderson
Guilfoyle was probably shocked to learn this information, right? Well, not so fast. The day after the first Daily Mail reports, friends of the former Fox News host told the tabloid that she might have had an idea of what was going on.
“Kimberly either didn’t know about Bettina — or didn’t want to know. Did she hear whispers that Don Jr. was fooling around with someone else? Probably,” one of Guilfoyle’s so-called friends said. “She’s no fool but it’s easy to deceive yourself when you’re so committed to someone and believe he’s committed to you.”
Guilfoyle and Trump have been together since 2018, and got engaged on New Year’s Eve 2020 (his birthday). During their time together, she became a mainstay in the MAGA world, often seen at Trump events, delivering speeches at Republican National Conventions, and sharing almost nothing but pro-Trump content on Instagram. By Election Night this year, it seemed like she and Trump Jr. had worked things out, as she stood by his side at his father’s victory speech.
But all was reportedly not well. The Daily Mail is back on the Trumpfoyle beat, and on Tuesday, they reported that the purportedly engaged couple has not been spotted together since November 12. Meanwhile, on Monday, Don Jr. and Bettina were photographed holding hands while out to dinner to celebrate her 38th birthday. The tabloid also reported that he has been living with his new girlfriend at her West Palm Beach townhouse instead of in the $15.5 million mansion he and Guilfoyle bought in 2021.
Gross. Who would want to hang around with Don Jr., much less live with him? I guess it takes all kinds.
According to US Magazine, via Yahoo News, Anderson is “a model and an influencer” with “more than 38,000 followers on” Instagram.
Anyway, Trump Sr. is giving Guilfoyle a consolation prize–He plans to appoint her Ambassador to Greece.
“For many years, Kimberly has been a close friend and ally,” the president-elect said in his announcement, which he posted to Truth Social.
Kimberly Guilfoyle and Don Jr
“Her extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect make her supremely qualified to represent the United States, and safeguard its interests abroad. Kimberly is perfectly suited to foster strong bilateral relations with Greece, advancing our interests on issues ranging from defense cooperation to trade and economic innovation.”
Guilfoyle’s nomination requires Senate confirmation and would see her handling foreign affairs.
The announcement hit conspicuously soon after Trump Jr., 46, was pictured cozying up with Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson, 38.
Trump Jr. made no comment on the rumors on social media when he congratulated Guilfoyle in a brief statement to X Tuesday night: “I am so proud of Kimberly. She loves America and she always has wanted to serve the country as an Ambassador. She will be an amazing leader for America First.”
There’s more information coming out on Luigi Mangione, the man who has been arrested and charged with murdering of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson in NYC. Here’s the latest:
The mainstream media has refused to publish Mangione’s “manifesto,” but Ken Klippenstein has posted it on his website:
I’ve obtained a copy of suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s manifesto — the real one, not the forgery circulating online. Major media outlets are also in possession of the document but have refused to publish it and not even articulated a reason why. My queries to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered.
I’ll have more to say on this later — on how unhealthy the media’s drift away from public disclosure is — but for now, here’s the manifesto:
“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
When the identity of Luigi Mangione, the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter, was revealed on Monday, the online search — a reporting process that’s become a collective online ritual — began. It turns out he left a lot of information online: an active account on X, an Instagram, a Facebook, a Goodreads, a Reddit account, and maybe even a Tinder profile. The dossier came together fast.
Luigi Mangione
Reporters and social-media users noted possible red flags, strange and eerie fragments of information, and small ironies. On Goodreads, he had posted a contrarian riff on Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto. Was it evidence of violent tendencies? He also reviewed a couple of books about back pain. On X, he posted about AI superintelligence and followed some anti-woke pundits. Had he tumbled down a slippery slope? Was he blackpilled? Some sort of accelerationist? On Reddit, he posted about backpacks and spinal injuries. Had he been hiding in plain sight all along?
In isolation, with the hindsight that they were posted by someone who went on to allegedly assassinate a health-care CEO, these accounts, and some of these posts, assumed new meaning, which is reasonable and understandable: It’s a crazy story that people want to understand, and the way social media has been processing it more broadly is unprecedented in about six different ways. But what’s most striking about Mangione’s extensive online dossier is that, had it been studied before the shooting took place, it wouldn’t have raised much alarm. You can spend hours reading these posts, sifting through his follows, and looking for clues about what Type of Guy he is, but the supportable theories are pretty thin: Mangione had an online profile consonant with his identity and context. He shared and posted and followed like a 20-something striver with a foot in the tech industry, listened to Rogan, and considered himself a rationalist or at least unusually rational….
His media consumption — wellness podcasts, a dash of “heterodox” punditry, tech personalities on X — might have placed him near some worrying ideological tendencies, but no more so than millions of other young men in his social milieu; on digital paper, he’s a bit like one of those young male swing voters that dominated post-election recriminations, albeit with an Ivy on his LinkedIn. If a dating profile led you to these accounts, you might wonder if he was going to talk at you about AI or if he might be sort of socially awkward. You might wonder if he’s a bit of a pod bro, or an RFK guy, but you’d also see a lot of stuff that looks — again, without future context — if not normal, then demographically typical. You wouldn’t have wondered if he was planning an assassination. You’d probably have assumed he was friendly! Now, everyone’s looking for the online trail that leads directly the sidewalk in front of the Midtown Hilton, but they haven’t quite found it. Nor, in 2024, should they expect to.
Herrmann argues that a criminal’s “on-line footprint” doesn’t really reveal who a person is anymore, if it ever did.
Faith in the existence of meaning in the “online trail” started waning when social media achieved full ubiquity. By the mid-2010s, the sorts of evidence you’d find in the aftermath of a shocking news event tended to be either hidden in places like 4chan — intentionally inscrutable communities within a fully mainstream internet — or left behind intentionally to be found and shared in the form of a manifesto, an archived Discord channel, or a recording of the act itself. These revelations could still be illuminating or at least shocking — the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter left a trail of posts on the right-wing social-media site Gab, for example — but in recent years, the post-news deep-dive, which has become a messy and fraught spectacle unto itself, wasn’t producing much in the way of understanding. Mostly, if you were planning a dramatic crime, you knew better than to post about it. If you wanted nobody to see you, or suspect you of anything, you simply didn’t post about it.
Mangione’s stubbornly normal online footprint, and the way the media and public have feasted upon it, marks the closing of this circle. Online, he was a guy with unremarkable niche interests and a serious appetite for boring productivity books. The reflexive assumption that his digital trail must contain essential, decodable truths about his motives has produced less in the way of insight than of fandom, which is constructed online through a similar process of breathless driven data aggregation.
Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with killing the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare at a company investors’ day, was arrested with a notebook that detailed plans for the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials.
The notebook described going to a conference and killing an executive, the officials said.
Luigi Mangione
“What do you do? You wack the C.E.O. at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” was one passage written in the notebook, the officials said….
When Mr. Mangione was arrested, the authorities also found a 262-word handwritten note with him, which begins by appearing to take responsibility for the murder. The note, which officials described as a manifesto, also mentioned the existence of a notebook. The recovery of the notebook was first reported by CNN.
The suspect saw the killing as a “symbolic takedown,” according to a New York Police Department internal report that detailed parts of a three-page manifesto found with him at the time of his arrest. The report added that the suspect “likely views himself as a hero of sorts who has finally decided to act upon such injustices” and expressed concern that others might see him as a “martyr and an example to follow.” [….]
On his way into court on Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Mangione shouted about “an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience.”
It was not exactly clear what he was referring to as deputies worked to push him into the courthouse. On Wednesday, the sheriff of Blair County, James E. Ott, said that otherwise Mr. Mangione had not given deputies any problems.
Even when Luigi Mangione was surrounded with people who cared about him, he was isolated by a spinal defect that dealt the athletic young man crippling pain and contributed to a jaundiced view of the American health-care system.
Authorities charged Mangione, 26, with murder in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York, but have said little about a motive for the killing. They found a three-page, handwritten document on Mangione that expressed disdain for the American health-care system, they’ve said.
On Reddit in April, Mangione foreshadowed that skepticism about the health-care industry as he offered advice for getting a doctor to perform spinal surgery.
“Tell them you are ‘unable to work’ / do your job,” he wrote. “We live in a capitalist society. I’ve found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it’s impacting your quality of life.”
Nothing in his Reddit posts reviewed by The Postindicate violent intentions. Authorities have not laid out their case for what drove Mangione to escalate his frustration with the health system, which is common in the United States, into an allegedly premeditated murder of a prominent health-care executive….
Mangione’s arrest has stunned his friends and family, most of whom appear to have lost touch with him in the last six months.
“We all condemn violence of any kind,” said Josiah Ryan, a spokesman for Surfbreak HNL, a co-living community in Honolulu where Mangione lived for six months in 2022. He added, “There’s sadness, because he was a person who was well-loved and no one saw this coming.”
Mangione’s back X-ray
Ryan said that Mangione’s back pain was well known within the Surfbreak community. “It was a real problem for him, and he had to think about that in a way that most 24-year-old young men living in Hawaii would not have to worry about their health,” he said.
Mangione’s struggles with his back pain offer a glimpse into the interior life of a young man who outwardly lived a charmed existence — the scion of a wealthy family in Maryland who was valedictorian of his prestigious private school in Baltimore and earned degrees in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania….
In archived Reddit comments, Mangione doesn’t express anger toward UnitedHealthcare or other health insurers. But the posts chronicle his struggle over years to deal with back pain that became increasingly debilitating.
“From childhood until age 23, my back would always ache if I stood too long, but it wasn’t too bad,” he wrote in February. But as he entered his mid-20s, the pain began to disrupt his life, and he also struggled with cognitive issues.
In a Reddit group focused on brain fog, he wrote, “The people around you probably won’t understand your symptoms — they certainly don’t for me.”
Lots of people live with chronic pain (including me), but we don’t kill people over it.
In an 82-page court filing made public Tuesday, Manhattan prosecutors say Donald Trump’s “history of malicious conduct” is too serious for his hush-money case to be dismissed.
The filing, signed by DA Alvin Bragg, also fights Trump’s claim that he enjoys something called presidential-elect immunity — above and beyond the presidential immunity bestowed on him by the US Supreme Court in June.
“There are no grounds for such relief now, prior to inauguration,” Bragg wrote in opposing Trump’s 11th-hour motion to dismiss, “because President-elect immunity does not exist.”
With just six weeks left before his January 20 inauguration — and six months after a Manhattan jury convicted him — Trump is again demanding that New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan immediately dismiss his hush-money case.
It’s his third time trying to void his indictment or his conviction. If successful, Trump would escape altogether his already thrice-delayed sentencing.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
The president elect faces as little as no jail time and a potential maximum of four years prison for falsifying 34 business records throughout his first year of office to retroactively hide a hush-money payment to adult actress Stormy Daniels. (Legal experts have said that it’s unlikely Trump would be sentenced to jail time as a 78-year-old first-time offender convicted of low-level felonies, and any jail sentence would be stayed as he appeals.)
Trump paid for Daniels’ silence just eleven days before 2016 election, and jurors unanimously found that he thereby conspired to promote his own election by unlawful means, Bragg wrote.
The evidence presented against Trump was “overwhelming,” reads the filing, which is also signed by a lead prosecutor on the case, Christopher Conroy.
“The crimes that the jury convicted defendant of committing are serious offenses that caused extensive harm to the sanctity of the electoral process and to the integrity of New York’s financial marketplace,” which relies on honest record-keeping, Bragg wrote.
One of the strangest aspects in living in a declining democracy is that everyone is forced to learn about arcane areas of the law … if only to see them trampled by the despot.
The first Trump administration taught us about the Logan Act, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and the Presidential Records Act. Those were all about the limits of the president’s authority. Could Trump dispatch Mike Flynn to secretly negotiate with the Russian ambassador before taking office? Could he simply stack federal agencies with his cronies serving in an acting capacity and avoid Senate confirmation? Could he steal or destroy government records?
The answer was an enthusiastic “yes,” thanks to the Supreme Court, with an assist from Judge Aileen Cannon. In the name of ensuring that he can act “boldly” and “without hesitation,” six conservative justices gave the president unlimited authority to commit crimes without fear of prosecution. The imperial presidency is upon us.
But even that blank check isn’t enough for Trump and his enablers. To reshape society, they need the legislative and judicial branches to be more than supine. They need to steal Congress’s power, too. And so, while we’re learning about Trump’s plans to use recess appointments to sidestep the senate’s constitutionally mandated “advice and consent” role, we now have to learn about the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
I can’t do this important post justice with excerpts, but there’s no paywall, so please go read it at Public Notice. Here’s a bit more.
It all goes back to Nixon
The Constitution vests “the power of the purse” in Congress.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 1, AKA the Spending Clause, specifies that “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” And Section 9 says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”
Congress passes the budget and allocates government revenues as it sees fit — that’s just black-letter law. And so in 1972, Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, allocating $5 billion for 1973, $6 billion for 1974, and $7 billion for 1975 for municipal sewer updates. President Richard Nixon tried and failed to veto the law, and, after it was passed, he instructed EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus to allot “[n]o more than $2 billion of the amount authorized for the fiscal year 1973, and no more than $3 billion of the amount authorized for the fiscal year 1974.”
The City of New York sued, and in a 1975 case called Train v. City of New York, the Supreme Court held that Nixon had no discretion to refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Ruckelshaus was obligated to dispense the $18 billion over three years, despite Nixon’s strong belief that cities should simply live with rotting pipes.
And while that case was percolating through, Congress went one further and passed the Impoundment Control Act, to make it clear to Nixon that he should quit encroaching on their turf and monkeying with the budget….
Under the ICA, the president must either spend the funds obligated by the legislature, or come to Congress with a “special message” and explain why not. Congress then has 45 days to vote for rescission, rescinding the original allocation. If Congress doesn’t agree, or simply ignores the message, the funds must be spent as originally ordained. (Here’s a handy ICA fact sheet from the Dems on the House Budget Committee.)
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who clearly don’t know or care about the separation of powers, are currently promising to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget and delete entire federal agencies through their fake DOGE committee. But even in his first administration, Trump violated the ICA by withholding the defense allocation for Ukraine in 2019.
Read the rest at the link.
That’s all I have for today. We’re having a stormy day here, so I’m going to try to distract myself with a good book. Have a nice day, everyone.
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I don’t think I’ve fully come to terms with the fact that we are once again faced with Donald Trump as “president.” Of course we really don’t know what is going to happen to our country or to us as its citizens, but we know it’s going to be bad.
The first Trump term was horrific, and that was when he believed he needed to listen to his advisers. He appointed somewhat competent people to top positions in his administration, and he occasionally listened to them. There were so-called “adults in the room” who were able to partially control his worst impulses, or sometimes just work around his demands.
This time will be different. He is nominating people who are loyal to him personally but have no expertise in the positions they have been chosen for. They have been picked to destroy the bureaucracies they will control.
Trump knows that some of these people could be rejected by the Senate, so he is demanding the power to use “recess appointments.” He wants the Senate and the House to be in recess after his inauguration so that he can install these loyal incompetents without involving the Senate’s “advise and consent” role. He also plans to grant security clearances to his chosen sycophants without FBI background checks. He means to destroy the independence of the Department of Justice, including the CIA and FBI. He also plans to take full control of the military and enforce loyalty to him, and not to the Constitution.
Thanks to the right wing Supreme Court, he may be able to accomplish these things. They have granted him immunity for anything he does in his role president, including crimes.
During his first term, Trump often praised foreign dictators. He expressed admiration for China’s Xi Jinping’s takeover in China, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He praised Xi for making himself president for life. He admires Erdoğan for ending democracy in his country and taking power for the long term. He repeatedly said he would like “my people” to behave obediently like Kim John Un’s audiences–by mindlessly applauding everything he says or does. And of course everyone knows that Trump admires and fears Russia’s Vladimir Putin. We now know that Trump even praised Adolf Hitler during his time in the White House. We have a very good idea of what Trump hopes to do to this country.
Why should we expect that Trump will now behave like any other U.S. president? Why should we be so sure that there will be meaningful elections in 2026 and 2028? The leaders that Trump has praised have made sure that any elections held in their countries are–to use Trump’s term–rigged? Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and Orban are still in control of their countries. North Korea, of course, is a family dictatorship. Perhaps Trump hopes to pass on control of the U.S. to one of his children. We need to be aware of what he may be planning–not imagine that we live in the previous U.S. in which laws and norms protected us from a wannabe dictator.
After the announcement that Trump would forgo background checks on his appointees, investigative journalist Dave Troy wrote (on Twitter, I won’t link to it)
Let me be clear: the country is gone. You may still think you have one, but it’s like phantom limb syndrome. Don’t look yet. It’s too painful. But when you’re ready, gaze upon it. For all its volume and noise and mass… it is but an illusion. What comes next is hell, and chaos.
We had a chance. But today, I think, is the day we lost it. The day the free world fell. We will go through motions and react and laugh, or not laugh, we will be serious and joking and call each other horrible things. But this was the day when the last bulwark fell.
By Lucy Almey Bird
I have to agree with him. Trump fantasizes about being president for life like Putin, Xi, and Orban. We are in serious danger of becoming another Hungary.
I hope I’m overreacting. Maybe PTSD is making me more fearful than I need to be. I know my sleep has been even more disturbed than usual lately. But I’d rather face what Trump is really up to than act like the Democrats, who seem to just assume that politics as usual will be restored after free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028.
I am an optimist at heart, and I still have hope for the future. I hope that everything I’ve written above is wrong. But I’ll have to see it happen in order to truly believe it.
Here are some reads to check out today:
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about the term Kakistocracy. This article by Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini in The Atlantic explores the idea: American Kakistocracy. Italy knows a thing or two about what the United States faces—but there are key differences between the two countries’ experiences.
Why is a regular guy attracted to a billionaire candidate? It’s simple: Because the candidate can play to people’s fantasies. The man knows his television, loves girls, hates rules, knows how to make a deal, tells jokes, uses bad language, and is convivial to a fault. He is loud, vain, cheeky. He has a troubled relationship with his age and his hair. He has managed to survive embarrassment, marital misadventures, legal troubles, political about-faces. He’s entangled in conflicts of interest, but he couldn’t care less. His party? A monument to himself.
He thinks God is his publicist, and twists religion to suit his own ends. He may not be like us, but he makes sure there’s something about him that different people can relate to personally. He is, above all, a man of enormous intuition. He is aware of this gift and uses it ruthlessly. He knows how to read human beings, their desires and their weaknesses. He doesn’t tell you what to do; he forgives you, period.
Here in Italy, he loomed over our politics—and our lives—for 30 years. He created his own party in 1994 (Forza Italia, a sort of Make Italy Great Again), and a few months later, he became Italy’s prime minister for the first time. He didn’t last long, but he climbed back into government in 2001, and then again in 2008. Three years later, he resigned amid sex scandals and crumbling public finances, but he managed to remain a power broker until he died last year.
Silvio Berlusconi, like Donald Trump, was a right-wing leader capable of attracting the most disappointed and least informed voters, who historically had chosen the left. He chased them, understood them, pampered them, spoiled them with television and soccer. He introduced the insidious dictatorship of sympathy.
By Steve Danielson
But Silvio Berlusconi is not Donald Trump.
Berlusconi respected alliances and was loyal to his international partners. He loved both Europe and America. He believed in free trade. And he accepted defeat. His appointments were at times bizarre but seldom outrageous. He tried hard to please everybody and to portray himself as a reliable, good-hearted man. Trump, as we know, doesn’t even try.
Berlusconi may have invented a format, but Trump adopted and twisted it. Trump’s victory on November 5 is clear and instructive, and it gives the whole world a signal as to where America is headed.
he scent of winners is irresistible for some people. The desire to cheer Trump’s victory clouds their view. They don’t see, or perhaps don’t take seriously, the danger signs. Reliability and coherence, until recently a must for a political leader, have taken a back seat. Showing oneself as virtuous risks being counterproductive: It could alienate voters, who would feel belittled.
American journalism—what is left of it, anyway—meticulously chronicled Trump’s deceitfulness. It made no difference, though. On the contrary, it seems to have helped him. Trump’s deputy, J. D. Vance, explained calmly in an interview that misleading people—maybe even lying to them—is sometimes necessary to overcome the hostility of the media.
Here’s a gift link if you’d like to read the rest at The Atlantic.
When Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, critics scoffed that there was no way he could win New York State. Yet as a strategic matter, asking the question “What would it take for a Republican to win New York?” leads to the answer, “It would take overperforming with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters.”
Mr. Trump didn’t win New York, of course, but his gains with nonwhite voters helped him sweep all seven battleground states.
Unlike Democrats, Mr. Trump engaged in what I call supermajority thinking: envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.
Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment. We have been conditioned to think of our era of polarization as a stable arrangement of rough parity between the parties that will last indefinitely, but history teaches us that such periods usually give way to electoral realignments. Last week, Mr. Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like. Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.
That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.
Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.
Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.
Locked out of power next year, Democrats are hatching plans to oppose President-elect Donald J. Trump that look nothing like the liberal “resistance” of 2017.
Gone are the pink knit caps and homemade signs from the huge protest that convulsed blue America that year, as exhausted liberals seem more inclined to tune out Mr. Trump than fight.
By Lucy Olivieri
Washington is far different, too. The Republicans who stymied some of Mr. Trump’s first-term agenda are now dead, retired or Democrats. And the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by the former president, has proved how far it will go in bending to his will.
As they face this tough political landscape, Democratic officials, activists and ambitious politicians are seeking to build their second wave of opposition to Mr. Trump from the places that they still control: deep-blue states.
Democrats envision flexing their power in these states to partly block the Trump administration’s policies — for example, by refusing to enforce immigration laws — and to push forward their vision of governance by passing state laws enshrining abortion rights, funding paid leave and putting in place a laundry list of other party priorities.
Some of the planning in blue states began in 2023 as a potential backstop if Mr. Trump won, according to multiple Democrats involved in different efforts. The preparations were largely kept quiet to avoid projecting public doubts about Democrats’ ability to win the election.
“States in our system have a lot of power — we’re entrusted with protecting people, and we’re going to do it,” said Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, who said his office had been preparing for Mr. Trump’s potential return to power for more than a year. “They can expect that we’re going to show up every single time when they try to run over the American people.”
The Democratic effort will rely on the work of hundreds of lawyers, who are being recruited to combat Trump administration policies on a range of Democratic priorities. Already, advocacy groups have begun workshopping cases and recruiting potential plaintiffs to challenge expected regulations, laws and administrative actions starting on Day 1.
But Fetterman, who built a blunt, says-what-he-means brand, said Democratic setbacks in 2024 had more to do with unpopular positions progressives promoted than any lack of communication from the party’s center-left establishment.
“It’s not even what you might say as a candidate,” Fetterman said in an interview, adding “all of the very hard-left, kind of ‘woke’ things” Republicans used in advertising this year “are unloaded on the backs of all of us in purple states, and we’re paying for all of the things that our colleagues might say in these hard blue kinds of districts.”
That’s part of Fetterman’s broader post-election message for his party. Moving forward, he says, Democrats can’t get wrapped up in “freaking out” over every controversial move Trump makes, adding that has proven to be a losing formula for the party and its brand. He was speaking after Trump selected former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., for attorney general and just before he tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
“I’ve said this before, it’s like, clutch those pearls harder and scold louder — that’s not going to win,” Fetterman, D-Pa., said. “And that’s been demonstrated in this cycle.”
In the interview, Fetterman detailed his thoughts on this month’s election, how he’s readying for his party’s life in the wilderness and whether he has interest in seeking the presidency in 2028.
Black women have long had to navigate being twice as good to get half the amount of credit. Kamala Harris’s presidential run was evidence of this.
Despite the stark difference in the tenor of each candidate’s campaign and the the quality of their policy proposals, many still questioned whether they could trust Harris’s leadership and opted for her opponent. Ultimately, an overwhelming majority of white voters voted Republican.
National exit polls showed that for white voters, their choice was largely a product educational attainment. Fifty-seven percent of college-educated white women voted for Harris, while 63 percent of non-college white women voted for Donald Trump. For white men, regardless of educational level, a majority voted for Trump. Contrast that with the 77 percent of Black men and 91 percent of Black women who voted for Kamala Harris.
The majority of the Black electorate, regardless of educational level, voted for Harris. But it wasn’t enough. The outcome reminded me of the Glass Cliff and the double standards for Black leaders that come along with it.
In my own experience as a Black woman studying economics and policy at Harvard, I’ve seen how leadership roles for women of color, especially Black women, come with a unique set of risks and pressures, especially when taken on during challenging times.
For instance, early this year, Claudine Gay, the former president of my university, resigned after just six months on the job amid a concerted effort by right-wing culture-warriors to force her out. Gay was more than qualified for her job, but she wasn’t given the benefit of the doubt when she was accused of plagiarism and her tenure as the first Black person to lead Harvard ended up being the shortest in history.
By Marcella Cooper
The Glass Cliff refers to situations where women from marginalized groups are promoted into leadership during times of crisis and/or when the risk of failure is high. For example, back in 2021, Yogananda Pittman became the first Black person and first woman to lead the Capitol Police as it faced criticism for its handling of January 6. Minorities and women getting promotions often face impossible circumstances. And if they succeed, the person who gave them the opportunity gets credit.
When Biden dropped out of the race in July, he left Kamala Harris with a challenge that no modern presidential candidate has faced. Biden was losing in the polls, Democrats were divided over his presidency and refusal to get out of the race earlier, and Harris had to compete against a man who not only had been running for president for years, but is also a seasoned purveyor of racism and sexism.
While pundits have busied themselves over the past 10 days nitpicking Harris’s campaign, one thing is abundantly clear: She was held to the highest standards of leadership while Trump was held to no standard at all. Where Harris was pressed to present concrete, detailed policy stances, Trump skated by with crude bigotry and mere “concepts of plans”.
Donald Trump has nominated his attorney D. John Sauer, whom you may remember as the lawyer who argued that the president should be able to kill his political rivals with impunity, to be the country’s next solicitor general.
Earlier this year, Sauer helped Trump win his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court, which undermined other federal legal battles against Trump, like the time he tried to overturn the government after losing the 2020 election. Now Sauer will oversee all federal lawsuits.
In a statement Thursday, Trump lauded Sauer as the “lead counsel representing me in the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, winning a Historic Victory on Presidential Immunity, which was key to defeating the unConstitutional campaign of Lawfare against me and the entire MAGA movement.”
While representing Trump, Sauer argued that if the president ordered an assassination on his political enemies, he could not be indicted unless he had first been impeached.
When Justice Sonia Sotomayor drilled him about immunity in the case of assassinating political rivals, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical but we can see that would well be an official act.” When she asked if the same rule existed if the president executed people for “personal gain,” Sauer said that immunity still stood.
The White House is finalizing plans to spend Joe Biden’s last months in office putting the finishing touches on his legacy — even as it welcomes a successor determined to tear it all down.
By Marcella Cooper
Senior Biden aides mapping out the remaining 65 days are prioritizing efforts to cement key pillars of the president’s agenda by accelerating manufacturing and infrastructure investments. They’re placing fresh emphasis on the major health and energy policies most at risk of repeal, while coordinating a Senate sprint to fill judicial vacancies. And in a move that could mark the last gasp of tangible American support for Ukraine, officials are rushing out $6 billion of remaining aid and preparing a final round of sanctions against Russia.
New measures targeting the nation’s lucrative energy industry are among the sanctions under consideration, a White House official granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations said, now that the administration is freed from pre-election anxieties over the potential impact on domestic gas prices.
The final flurry of work has provided a renewed sense of purpose within a White House unmoored by Donald Trump’s pending return to power, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen administration officials and outside advisers. Yet there’s also open acknowledgment that for all the activity, little they do in the next two months may matter after Inauguration Day.
Trump is poised to take a sledgehammer to much of what the administration leaves behind — and no amount of tending to Biden’s own reputation can stop it.
“The bottom line,” said Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy expert close to senior Biden officials, “is there just isn’t anything Biden can do today that isn’t reversible in 10 weeks.”
Those are my recommended reads for today. The good news is that the worst hasn’t happened yet. We are still living in a sort of democracy.
Take care, everyone.
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“Make America Garbage Again,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
After sleeping through last week, I have finally decided that PTSD has kicked in, and I’m in survival mode. At least I woke up to find the word that best describes what we’re watching unfold. From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
This is what we will have after January 20,2025, which is, ironically enough, not only the inauguration of the first felon to ever hold office but also the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King. Somewhere, the Greek Muses have entered the realm of Greek Tragedy. All we need is a chorus.
I turned to some TV news last night to watch the faces of the political class chatter about the proposed cabinet members with the look of teenagers stuck in a summer camp horror film. Yes, this all does feel like a very bad movie or dream that you want to be over when you awaken. However, it is more like the idea of the tyranny of the masses that Alexis de Tocqueville dreamed of while writing his book Democracy in America. He was very afraid of the unwashed masses, and now we know why.
The greatest danger Tocqueville saw was that public opinion would become an all-powerful force, and that the majority could tyrannize unpopular minorities and marginal individuals. In Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 7, “Of the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects,” he lays out his argument with a variety of well-chosen constitutional, historical, and sociological examples.
I love that last part because it comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a history class curriculum prepared for teachers on the topic. Quick, go read it or get your copy of the book before both are banned and defunded. It’s an independent agency, like the Fed, and we’ll see how long into the kakistocracy that remains to be true for both. I imagine I would never get grants to be funded as I did in 1982 to bring Kate Millet and Betty Friedan to Omaha and funds to expand our Women’s Festival to include black women presenters. That was even during the Reagan years. He must have been damned woke or completely asleep, drooling on the Resolute desk to miss that opportunity.
“Matt is the man selected to hide all the criming, appropriate.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Okay, so let me really depress you now with some headlines. This is from Public Notice‘s Lisa Needham. “Trump moves to burn down the rule of law. His cabinet nominations are obscene and augur dark days to come.” And you thought I was being a bummer!
When the sordid history of the second Trump administration is written, should we all survive that long, it will be difficult to sort out which of his early cabinet picks were the most atrocious. And while handing over control of the military to a weekend Fox News host or putting an anti-vax creep in charge of America’s top public health agency are really bad, it will be hard to sink lower than Matt Gaetz being nominated as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Let’s pretend, for just a moment, that Gaetz isn’t just being given this job because he’s a lib-triggering Trump crony and evaluate him on the merits. Gaetz’s legal experience, such as it is, seems to consist of a stint at a small firm in Florida, Anchors Garden, where he worked after graduating from law school in 2007. The firm currently has only nine attorneys, and Gaetz devotes precisely one line to the experience in his self-servingly weird House bio, saying, “Prior to serving in Congress, Matt worked as an attorney in Northwest Florida with the Keefe, Anchors & Gordon law firm, where he advocated for a more open and transparent government.”
Advocating for a more open and transparent government sounds pretty important, right? But while the firm does have a government affairs and public records practice, when Mother Jones did a deep dive into Gaetz’s experience there, what they turned up instead was that he working on things like debt collection and representing a homeowners’ association over a dispute about a beach volleyball net. It isn’t even entirely clear when Gaetz stopped working at the firm. His House bio skips ahead to his 2010 election to the Florida House, and his legal work is never mentioned again.
This is not the biography of someone you would hire to be an assistant district attorney in a mid-size American city, much less the head of the entire Department of Justice.
Compare Gaetz to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general pick during his previous term. Sure, Sessions was so racist that he couldn’t get confirmed as a judge. But he also spent 12 years as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and two years as the Alabama attorney general before being elected to four consecutive Senate terms. During his time in the Senate, he served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, becoming its ranking member in 2009. Sessions was a repulsive and retrograde choice for AG, but he wasn’t a demonstrably unqualified one.
That’s a sunny note to start your weekend on. Wait, there’s more! If you want to see real pearl-clutching, you must go to WAPO or NYT. But they’re a little too late for me. Here’s something from The Bulwark. I’ve suddenly gone all in for the alt-press like I did in 1970 when I started writing for Omaha’s underground Newspaper, The Aardvark, to write terrible things about Richard Nixon. “Gaetz Begins Lobbying Lawmakers, Hoping He Hasn’t Burned All the Bridges/ The congressman and his team are trying to convince Senators to overlook a potentially damning ethics report and his history of political histrionics.” This analysis is coauthored by Mark Caputo and Joe Perticone.
Though Trump has made a slew of controversial picks (the latest being Thursday’s nomination of anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services), Gaetz stands out as a singularly polarizing figure because of the investigations into his conduct, the accusations against him, and his strained personal relationship with fellow Republican members of Congress he has torched, including allies of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whose ouster he masterminded.
“We have 53 senators and we might not have 50 votes to confirm right now. It’s really up in the air,” said a member of Trump’s team briefed on its preliminary vote-counting. “Gaetz can be a real asshole. But he can be a great guy. The senators need to see the great guy and kind of hear the asshole apologize and tell them why all this stuff about sex crimes isn’t true.”
The push to confirm Gaetz is the latest test of his ability to survive crises that would have ruined any other politician. It also will provide an early indication of Trump’s ability to bend the Senate to his will. The president-elect has quickly moved to force votes on high-profile nominees that no other person in his position would have dared put forward. And as a fallback, he is pressuring incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune into giving him the right to bypass the Senate to make temporary appointments.
Doing so would get Trump’s cabinet in place. But it could come at a political cost if it perceived that the president is jamming through highly-controversial nominees. On Thursday, ABC reported that the woman at the center of the sex-crimes case had told House investigators that Gaetz had paid to have sex with her in 2017 when she was a minor. Gaetz was also allegedly implicated in paying other women for sex, which he has denied, and in illicit drug use.
The succession of nominations and reporting left Republican senators in an uncomfortable spot. Some, including those on the Senate Judiciary Committee—which would first vote on Gaetz’s nomination—said they wanted to see the House ethics report into Gaetz.
Donald Trump’s nomination of congressman Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general has arrived like a thunderclap in Washington.
Of all the president-elect’s picks for his administration so far, this is easily the most controversial – and sends a clear message that Trump intends to shake up the establishment when he returns to power.
The shockwaves were still being felt on Thursday morning as focus shifted to a looming fight in the Senate over his nomination.
Trump is assembling his team before he begins his term on 20 January, and his choice of defence secretary, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, and intelligence chief, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, have also raised eyebrows.
But it is Gaetz making most headlines. The Florida firebrand is perhaps best known for spearheading the effort to unseat then-Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy last year. But he has a history of being a flamethrower in the staid halls of Congress.
In 2018, he brought a right-wing Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, and later tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made about gun control.
His bombastic approach means he has no shortage of enemies, including within his own party. And so Trump’s choice of Gaetz for this crucial role is a signal to those Republicans, too – his second administration will be staffed by loyalists who he trusts to enact his agenda, conventional political opinion be damned.
Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.
Republican congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.
“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said. “This one was not on my bingo card.”
Gaetz is playing Rocky and is already running up and down the Capitol stairs trying to find the few people that like him. But even the New York Postis taking on the RFK appointment to HHS. I know, I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s even it’s Editorial Board. “Putting RFK Jr. in charge of health breaks the first rule of medicine.”
The overriding rule of medicine is: First, do no harm.
We’re certain installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services breaks this rule.
Maybe he’s sworn to focus narrowly on areas where he clearly can help — inspiring Americans to embrace healthier diets and more exercise, etc.
I wonder where eating roadkill and fish laded with mercury comes into that equation?
But wait! There are reasons to question every one of his appointments. This is from The Guardian. “Trump defense secretary nominee involved in 2017 sexual assault investigation, no charges filed – report.”
Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump nominated to be defense secretary, was involved in a sexual assault investigation in California seven years ago, but no charges were filed against him, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The incident happened in 2017 at a hotel and golf course in the city of Monterey, but there were few details of how Hegseth was involved, or what happened. Here’s more, from the Chronicle:
In a brief statement late Thursday, the city manager’s office in Monterey confirmed the sexual assault investigation, but provided few details.
The city said the incident was reported to have happened between almost midnight on Oct. 7, 2017, and 7 a.m. the next morning at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa on Del Monte Golf Course, less than a mile from Monterey Bay and across Highway 1 from the Naval Postgraduate School.
“The Monterey Police Department investigated an alleged sexual assault at 1 Old Golf Course Road,” the city said. It said the victim’s name was confidential and that the alleged assault was reported on Oct. 12, 2017. The city said no weapons were involved, but that there was a report of “contusions to right thigh.”
The city declined to release the police report, saying it was exempt from public disclosure, and said it would not make any further remarks on the probe.
The Monterey County District Attorney’s Office did not reply to a request for comment late Thursday, but an online database indicated no criminal charges had been filed against Hegseth in that county.
Vanity Fair reports that news of the allegation sent Trump’s transition team scrambling over the past few days:
Donald Trump’s transition team scrambled Thursday after Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles was presented with an allegation that former Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be Defense Secretary, had engaged in sexual misconduct. According to two sources, Wiles was briefed Wednesday night about an allegation that Hegseth had acted inappropriately with a woman. One of the sources said the alleged incident took place in Monterey, California in 2017.
According to the transition source, the allegation is serious enough that Wiles and Trump’s lawyers spoke to Hegseth about it on Thursday. A source with knowledge of the meeting said that Hegseth said the allegation stemmed from a consensual encounter and characterized the episode as he-said, she-said.
On Thursday evening, Hegseth’s lawyer Timothy Parlatore said: “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it.”
Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said: “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
That guy puts the sleaze in sleazy. Plus, he was investigated for war crimes and would be in charge of dealing with war criminals. This is from Time Magazine. “Pete Hegseth’s Role in Trump’s Controversial Pardons of Men Accused of War Crimes.”
Hegseth, a military veteran, staunch defender of Trump’s “America First” agenda, and an outspoken critic of what he calls the military’s “woke” culture, has built a career around challenging the military establishment. He held an influential role in advocating for Trump to intervene on behalf of service members in three cases involving war crime accusations in 2019—cases that divided the military and ignited fierce debates over the limits of executive power and military accountability.
Now, if he is confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense, Hegseth will oversee 1.3 million active-duty service members and manage military strategy at a time of global instability, raising questions about how his past approach towards accused war criminals will impact his military leadership and discipline.
During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for the pardons of Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, and pushed to support Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom were facing charges or convictions related to alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth’s advocacy on behalf of the three service members appeared to pay off: in Nov. 2019, Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, citing Hegseth and Fox News when he tweeted about his decision to review one of the cases.
Hegseth’s vocal defense of these men as victims of overzealous prosecution raised eyebrows in the military community, where such interventions by civilians are seen by some as a threat to the integrity of the justice system. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends in May 2019. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.”
Lorance had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents. Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before Trump, after lobbying from Hegseth and others, granted him a pardon in Nov. 2019, arguing that he was unfairly targeted by military prosecutors and that his actions were justified in a combat environment where split-second decisions were often necessary for survival.
This is from Military.com. ‘He’s Going to Have to Explain It’: Surprise Defense Secretary Pick’s History Takes Center Stage.”
He has repeatedly called to ban women from serving in combat roles in the military.
He advocated extensively to gain pardons for troops accused and convicted of war crimes.
And he was one of a dozen troops turned away from serving on the National Guard mission to defend the Capitol, allegedly over tattoos that are popular with neo-Nazi and far-right groups.
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s surprise pick to be the next defense secretary, has an extensive history of combat in the culture wars that have been brewing over the military for the past decade.
Prior to Trump’s announcement Tuesday evening that he was nominating Hegseth, the National Guard veteran was most known as a co-host on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends,” one of Trump’s favorite TV shows. But in choosing Hegseth, Trump landed on a defense secretary nominee with a record of public statements that line up with the promises Trump made on the campaign trail to root out alleged “wokeness” within the military.
Senators from both parties tasked with considering his nomination responded Wednesday by saying that they have a lot of questions about Hegseth’s history and those past statements, but broadly insisted they were reserving judgment.
“I’m going to have to visit with him about those remarks,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the Senate’s first female combat veteran who was rumored to be in the running for Trump’s defense secretary, told reporters Wednesday when asked about Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat.
“Even a staff member of mine, she is an infantry officer. She’s back in Iowa now. She is a tumble. So he’s going to have to explain it,” Ernst added, though she did not answer when Military.com asked whether she would vote against Hegseth over the issue.
So, this is basically a band of misfits and less than mediocre wipipo. But I’ll just let Muse tell it like it is. Yes, there are a lot of f-bombs in the lyrics!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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“Every single time he opens his mouth…” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
If you got to look into the sky last night, you got to see the Hunter’s supermoon. There certainly was a lot of Lunacy yesterday. That causation or even correlation doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, but it has a literary tradition covering nearly all periods of history. DonOld’s Yesterday fits the adage neatly.
“It is the very error of the moon.She comes more near the earth than she was wont. And makes men mad.”
—William Shakespeare, Othello
North Korea has dispatched special forces to support Russia in its war against Ukraine, with the first batch already having arrived in Russia and a second group of North Korean troops expected to follow soon, South Korea’s intelligence agency claimed on Friday.
The National Intelligence Service said it “confirmed that North Korea began its participation in the war by transporting special forces to Russia via Russian Navy transport ships from Oct. 8 to 13.”
However, the NIS provided no substantial evidence to support this claim, other than satellite imagery showing Russian vessels docked at the port of Chongjin in North Hamgyong Province.
Four amphibious ships and three escort ships from the Russian Pacific Fleet transported around 1,500 North Korean special forces to Vladivostok during this period, departing from areas near Chongjin and Musudan-ri in North Hamgyong Province, as well as Hamhung in South Hamgyong Province, according to the NIS.
The NIS further stated that a second operation to transport North Korean troops to Russia is “expected to take place soon.”
The North Korean soldiers deployed to Russia have been stationed at military bases in the Far East, spread across cities such as Vladivostok, Ussuriysk, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.
“They are expected to be sent to the battlefield once they complete their adaptation training,” the intelligence agency added.
According to the NIS, the North Korean soldiers were provided with Russian military uniforms and Russian-made weapons. They were also issued fake identification documents resembling residents of Siberian regions such as Yakutia and Buryatia, whose appearance is similar to North Koreans.
“This appears to be an attempt to disguise them as Russian soldiers and conceal their involvement in the war,” the NIS stated.
The NIS also reported that Kim Jong-sik, the first vice director of North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department and a key figure in the country’s missile development, was observed visiting a North Korean KN-23 missile launch site near the Russia-Ukraine front. He was accompanied by dozens of North Korean military officers to provide on-site guidance.
“It’s incomprehensible,” John Buss. @repeat1968. “More Full moon Madness!!!” me
American Madman DonOld is showing his age; finally, the legacy media have noticed and are reporting it. It only took 39 minutes of swaying to his playlist at a rally for them to start asking the real questions. He’s evidently tuckered out. “Trump cancels a streak of events with only days until election.” This is reported in AXIOS by Ivana Saric
Former President Trump’s planned appearance at a National Rifle Association event next week was cancelled Thursday, the latest in a slew of scuttled public appearances and interviews by the former president in recent weeks.
Why it matters: With only 17 days to go until Election Day, the spate of cancellations gives voters fewer chances to hear from Trump before heading to the polls in a coin toss race.
Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has been on a media blitz after enduring criticism from Republicans about a perceived lack of interviews.
And while Harris has ventured into the unfriendly territory of a Fox News interview, Trump has stuck to the safe spaces of conservative outlets.
In the appearances he has made, Trump’s rhetoric has grown more violent and nativist. In recent weeks, he has decried his critics as the “enemy from within” and fanned the flames of false conspiracy theories about migrants.
Driving the news: The NRA said Thursday it had cancelled its “Defend the 2nd” event with Trump in Savannah, Georgia, next week due to “campaign scheduling changes.”
Trump also pulled out of two mainstream media interviews this week, with NBC News and CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Earlier this month he backed out of a scheduled appearance on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” while Harris appeared on the program.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment.
Between the lines: Several of the events and interviews Trump has appeared at in recent weeks have raised eyebrows.
Trump cut short a Pennsylvania town hall this week to listen and sway to music for more than half an hour. “Let’s make it into a music fest,” Trump said. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”
Trump later claimed he was “hoodwinked” into the interview.
During an all-women Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday, Trump declared himself the “father of IVF,” a decades-old fertility treatment that has come under threat since overturning Roe v. Wade — which Trump has repeatedly bragged about ending.
DonOld is asking for a sitdown with Rupert Murdoch. This is from MEDIAITE’s Isaac Schorr. “Donald Trump Outlines His Demands For Rupert Murdoch Live On Fox News Ahead of Private Meeting: ‘I Don’t Know If He’s Thrilled.’”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump outlined his demands for conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch live on Fox News Friday morning, musing that Murdoch should stop airing negative ads and allowing Democratic guests on the network in the run up to Election Day.
After Fox & Friends’ Lawrence Jones thanked Trump for appearing on the show Friday, the former president jumped back in to ask Jones and his co-hosts, “You know what the event I have now?”
“No,” said Brian Kilmeade.
“A very big event,” continued the former president. “I’m going to see Rupert Murdoch.”
A pensive Kilmeade replied, “Alright,” and Steve Doocy exclaimed, “Okay!” before Trump pressed on.
“That’s a big event. I don’t know if he’s thrilled that I say it. And I’m going to tell him, I’m gonna tell him something very simple because I can’t talk to anybody else about it: Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days, don’t put them. And don’t put on the air their horrible people. They come and lie. I’m going to say, ‘Rupert, please do it this way.’”
“Right,” interjected Kilmeade.
“And then we’re going to have a victory, because I think everyone wants that,” concluded Trump.
Fox News anchor Bret Baier is apologizing for playing a misleadingly edited clip in an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris sat down with Baier on Wednesday for a tense interview, in which the “Special Report” host repeatedly cut off and chastised the Democratic candidate. One exchange in particular gave the game away.
When Harris admonished former President Trump over suggestions that he’d sic the military on his political opponents, Baier aired a portion of a Trump interview that omitted his comments against “the enemy from within.”
“I’m not threatening anybody,” Trump said in the clip Baier played. “They’re the ones doing the threatening.”
In a Thursday night episode of “Report,” Baier owned up his misdirection.
“I wanna say that I did make a mistake,” Baier admitted. “When I called for a soundbite, I was expecting a piece of the ‘enemy from within’ from Maria Bartiromo’s interview, to be tied to the piece from [Harris Faulkner’s ]town hall.”
Baier went on to play the intended clip for his audience, though Harris was still able to get her point across the previous night despite the misleading edit.
“You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people,” the vice president said on Wednesday. “In a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he would lock people up for doing it.”
Even the New York Times is noticing DonOld’s crazy demeanor and speech these days. “Trump’s Meandering Speeches Motivate His Critics and Worry His Allies. Some advisers and allies of former President Donald J. Trump are concerned about his scattershot style on the campaign trail as he continues to veer off script.” This is reported by Michael C. Bender.
Now, some Trump advisers and allies say privately they are concerned that the dynamic may be repeating itself four years later. They worry that Mr. Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow.
At a time when his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has stepped up her attacks on him as “unstable,” Mr. Trump has struggled to publicly hone his message by veering off script and ramping up personal attacks on Ms. Harris that allies have urged him to rein in.
“When he’s good, he’s great, and when he’s off message, he’s not so great,” said David Urban, a Trump adviser. “I don’t think anyone is really changing their mind at this point, but when he distracts from his biggest, broadest messaging, it’s counterproductive because the Harris campaign uses it to turn out their voters.”
During a speech on Saturday in California, he described mail-in ballots as “so corrupt,” reviving one of his false attacks on the 2020 election results, and did a play-by-play of his internal thoughts when he watched SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, fly a rocket back onto its launch site.
On Sunday, in response to a question on Fox News about the possibility of foreign adversaries’ meddling in the election, he reverted to autocratic language by saying “the bigger problem is the enemy from within.” On Monday, he halted a town-hall event in suburban Philadelphia after five questions when two people in the crowd needed medical attention. He spent roughly the next half-hour playing D.J., swaying and grooving in front of his crowd to a playlist he curated from the stage. “Let’s just listen to music,” he said.
Last week, he canceled a CBS interview on “60 Minutes,” in which he and Ms. Harris were both scheduled to appear — and has not stopped talking about it. He complained about it during events in Detroit and Reno, Nev., and again on Monday in a social media post at 1:12 a.m.
Special counsel Jack Smith on Friday released a massive trove of heavily redacted documents in his 2020 election subversion criminal case against former President Donald Trump.
There are nearly 2,000 pages in a massive trove of documents released Friday, but nearly all of the pages appear to be completely redacted.
The redacted appendices filed on the public docket in the case are related to Smith’s expansive filing from earlier this month that laid out his fullest picture yet of the case against Trump and Smith’s belief that his actions around the 2020 election should not be shielded by presidential immunity.
One volume is filled with sealed pages as well as tweets and other social media posts from Trump, his campaign and allies, including some posted during the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
One of the tweets include Trump’s post that day that Vice President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” that day in supporting his effort to change the election results.
Others include a myriad of claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election.
Prosecutors have argued that these tweets from Trump should be allowed to be used in the trial because they were personal in nature or part of his campaigning efforts and not his official duties as president.
The documents were released a day after Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a bid by Trump to pause the release. Trump argued that posting the documents now could be seen as election inference and had asked them to remain under seal until after Election Day.
“If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute – or appear to be – election interference,” Chutkan wrote in a decision late Thursday.
Another volume contains memos from lawyer John Eastman with a plan for Pence to reject the congressional certification of the 2020 election. The volume also includes a public statement Trump released the night before January 6 claiming he and Pence were on the same page about the congressional certification, Trump’s prepared remarks for his speech on January 6, and fundraising emails sent out by his 2020 campaign in the days before January 6.
Pence’s letter to Congress on January 6 explaining why he could not reject certifying the election and a transcript of Trump’s 2023 CNN town hall are also included in the documents.
The redacted files were expected to include an array of materials, including grand jury transcripts and notes from FBI interviews conducted during the yearslong investigation.
This was a big news dump week. Hopefully, the death of Yahya Sinwar will lead to a peaceful conclusion to this latest Mid-Eastern War. I’m not sure that’s what Bibi wants, but I’m sure the return of the hostages and a ceasefire would be a good start to ending hostilities. This is from Reuters. “Yahya Sinwar threw stick at drone just before death, according to Israel video. “
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was tracked by an Israeli mini drone as he lay dying in the ruins of a building in southern Gaza and filmed him slumped in a chair covered in dust, according to video released by Israeli authorities on Thursday.
As the drone hovered nearby, the video showed him throwing a stick at it, in an apparent act of desperation or defiance. Not long afterwards, the military said, a tank shell was fired into the building.
After an intensive manhunt that had lasted for more than a year, the Israeli troops that killed Sinwar were initially unaware that they had caught their country’s number one enemy after a gun battle on Wednesday, Israeli officials said.
Dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided final confirmation of Sinwar’s death for Israel and on Friday, Hamas confirmed their leader had been killed.
Intelligence services had been gradually restricting the area where Sinwar could operate, the military said. But unlike other militant leaders tracked down by Israel, including Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on July 13, the encounter which finally killed Sinwar was not a planned and targeted strike, or an operation carried out by elite commandos.
The seven days of Sukkot started last night. The Jewish Harvest Holiday lasts 7 days, and I’m sure there will be much celebration that there will be one less terrorist plotting another atrocity like October 7th. May all who observe find it in their hearts to search for peace and reconciliation with Israel’s innocent Palestinian neighbors. You would think eventually, we would all be way over all those who try to turn neighbors against each other. I know I’m hopeful we can get a better outcome here if we all just get out and vote for Kamala and Tim.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Every day I wonder why any American would support Donald Trump. His first term as “president” was a disaster. Among other horrors, he mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic and allowed hundreds of thousands of our citizens to die unnecessarily. He alienated our allies and sucked up to Vladimir Putin and other dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, China’s Xi jinping, and Turkey’s Tayip Erdogan. He frequently demonstrated his lack of respect for members of our military who risk their lives to protect their country. And of course he brazenly committed numerous crimes as “president.” How can anyone vote for this man for any public office?
Yesterday Trump once again demonstrated his contempt for U.S. military members who sacrificed their lives in service to their country.
Two members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official at Arlington National Cemetery, where the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony, NPR has learned.
A source with knowledge of the incident said the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The source said Arlington officials had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60.
When the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering Section 60, campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside, according to the source.
Trump participated in an event to mark the third anniversary of a deadly attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan as U.S. forces withdrew from the country; 13 U.S. service members were killed in the attack. The Trump campaign has blamed President Biden and Vice President Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, for the chaotic withdrawal.
In a statement to NPR, Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s spokesman, strongly rejected the notion of a physical altercation, adding: “We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.
“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” Cheung said in the statement.
A “mental health issue?” Why on earth was Trump participating in this event? He doesn’t hold any federal office. Apparently some relatives of fallen soldiers invited him.
Officials at Arlington national cemetery have filed a report over the behavior of members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff who reportedly shoved and verbally abused an employee during a “crass” photo opportunity for the Republican presidential candidate.
The officials confirmed that a confrontation took place at the Virginia cemetery on Monday after the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony for 13 US servicemen and -women killed in a 2021 suicide bomb attack in Kabul, Afghanistan.
In a statement, Arlington acknowledged one of its representatives became involved in the altercation with two Trump staffers, telling them that only cemetery representatives were allowed to take video and photographs in Section 60, an area where recent US casualties mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried….
The staffers “verbally abused and pushed the official aside” as the person attempted to prevent them accompanying Trump into the section, according to NPR, which first published the allegation on Tuesday night.
Following the wreath-laying, photographs from his visit showed Trump grinning and flashing a thumbs-up sign as he stood at the graves of several of the fallen military members, imagery that drew swift rebuke.
“The hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery are the final resting place of our American heroes. Trump defiled Arlington National Cemetery by doing a crass campaign stunt over the grave of a dead hero. And his campaign staff acted like bullies,” the Democratic California congressman Ted Lieu posted to X.
Trump couldn’t care less about the men and women buried in Arlington Cemetery.
In other news from yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment of Trump in the January 6 case in the DC Circuit. As Andrew Weissmann pointed out last night on MSNBC, Trump has now been criminally indicted by 5 grand juries.
Special counsel Jack Smith Tuesday announced that a grand jury had reindicted former President Donald Trump on four charges related to his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt to honor the direction given by the U.S. Supreme Court in its July ruling holding that Trump was immune from criminal prosecution for “official acts.”
“Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment,” Smith wrote in a separate filing to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is handling the case. “The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings.”
Trump’s first public reaction to the new indictment was to repost a message on Truth Social by Mike Davis, a former Senate lawyer who supports him, that ends with: “Bottom Line: There’s no chance this case goes to trial before the election. Trump wins. Jack Smith fired. Case closed.”
About an hour later, Trump personally responded with a five-post screed on his social media platform in which he called Smith “deranged” and claimed, without any evidence, that the prosecution was being directed by President Joe Biden’s White House. He also repeated his lie that Democrats had cheated to win the 2020 election.
He ended with: “PERSECUTION OF A POLITICAL OPPONENT!”
More on the indictment:
The “superseding” indictment, as it is known, charges Trump with the same four counts as in the original indictment that was filed a year ago: Conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing an official proceeding and conspiracy to deprive millions of Americans of their right to have their votes counted.
It follows the same narrative structure, laying out how Trump spent months after losing his 2020 reelection bid laying the groundwork for the violent assault on the Capitol by his mob of followers.
“Despite having lost, the defendant ― who was also the incumbent president ― was determined to remain in power,” Smith wrote. “So, for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election [that] he had actually won. These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.”
But Smith’s new indictment does not reference Trump’s efforts to enlist federal government employees in the executive branch — who all technically report to him. For instance, the original indictment had mentioned a Department of Justice official whom Trump considered making his attorney general because of his willingness to tell state officials that voter fraud had occurred. The new indictment does not include the official as a co-conspirator, but does still include the other five individuals who were not in government.
The Supreme Court ruled in July that Trump had immunity from prosecution for “official” acts, and specifically cited the ability to hire and fire executive branch employees to carry out his wishes.
The revised indictment, now at 36 pages compared to the 45-page original, still centers on Trump’s scheme to have allies in key states won by Biden create fake Electoral College slates and send them to the Senate. The plan was for then-Vice President Mike Pence to use the fake Trump slates instead of the legitimate slates for Democrat Joe Biden and declare Trump the winner.
Special counsel Jack Smith defiantly re-injected the question of Donald Trump’s bid to steal the 2020 election into the intensifying end game of this year’s White House race.
By trying to rescue his case after his initial indictment was gutted by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, Smith signaled that he is determined to bring the former president to justice — even though there will be no trial before Election Day.
“I think this is basically Jack Smith saying, ‘I still got this’” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a CNN legal and national security commentator, said after the special counsel on Tuesday filed a modified indictment endorsed by a new grand jury.
His move underscored the huge personal investment Trump has in winning the presidency in November: He not only would return to the nation’s top office, but would also gain the authority to halt this and another federal case against him and head off any sentences that could include jail time if he is convicted.
“This is a very big year, it is a very important election,” former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori told CNN’s Alex Marquardt on Tuesday. “This case is at stake in the election, because if Trump wins, it is going away. If Trump loses to Harris, this case is going to proceed to some sort of conclusion.”
The conservative majority’s ruling earlier this summer that Trump could be covered by immunity from criminal prosecution for some of his actions as president represented one of the most consequential moments in Supreme Court history and has massive implications for the US system of government. Many mainstream scholars blasted the decision as contrary to the spirit of the country’s founders in that it appeared to hand significant unchecked powers to the presidency.
The decision also sent shockwaves through an already tumultuous presidential race, since it appeared to offer an ex-president who already believed he was all powerful the chance to pursue strongman rule if he wins November’s election. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris criticized the decision in her convention speech last week: “Consider, the power he will have … Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States.”
Smith’s move also creates other profound political, legal, and constitutional overtones at a critical national moment, 10 weeks from an election that could profoundly reshape the country and that may again test its institutions to the limit.
In this Xitter thread, I went through everything that had been added or removed from the superseding indictment against Trump, based on this redline. The changes include the following:
Removal of everything having to do with Jeffrey Clark
Removal of everything describing government officials telling Trump he was nuts (such as Bill Barr explaining that he had lost Michigan in Kent County, not Wayne, where he was complaining)
Removal of things (including Tweets and Trump’s failure to do anything as the Capitol was attacked) that took place in the Oval Office
Addition of language clarifying that all the remaining co-conspirators (Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and — probably — Boris Epshteyn) were private lawyers, not government lawyers
Tweaked descriptions of Trump and Mike Pence to emphasize they were candidates who happened to be the incumbent
New language about the treatment of the electoral certificates
The logic of Blassingame is why Jack Smith included these paragraphs describing that Trump and Pence were acting as candidates.
1. The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was a candidate for President of the United States in 2020. He lost the 2020 presidential election.
[snip]
5. In furtherance of these conspiracies, the Defendant tried–but failed–to enlist the Vice President, who was also the Defendant’s running mate and, by virtue of the Constitution, the President of the Senate, who plays a ceremonial role in the January 6 certification proceeding.
As I’ve said repeatedly, it’s not clear that adopting the Blassingame rubric will work for SCOTUS, even though they did nothing to contest this rubric.
That’s because Chief Justice Roberts used Pence’s role as President of the Senate to deem his role in certification an official responsibility, thereby deeming Trump’s pressure of Pence an official act. Smith will need to rebut the presumption of immunity but also argue that using these conversations between Trump and Pence will not chill the President’s authority.
Read the rest at Emptywheel.
Another big story from yesterday: New video came out about Nancy Pelosi’s role on January 6.
Nancy Pelosi spent the duration of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack focused on ensuring Joe Biden would be certified president as soon as possible. Then she turned her attention to Donald Trump.
“I just feel sick about what he did to the Capitol and the country today,” Pelosi said as she slumped, visibly exhausted, in the back of her SUV in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 7. “He’s got to pay a price for that.”
Pelosi’s comment was included in about 50 minutes of unaired footage captured by her daughter, filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, who was at the former speaker’s side at key moments on Jan. 5, 6 and 7 in 2021. POLITICO has reviewed the footage, which HBO turned over this week to the Republican-led House Committee on Administration.
Pelosi’s office on January 6
The panel is conducting an investigation aimed at undermining the findings of the Jan. 6 select committee, which found Trump singularly responsible for the havoc his supporters unleashed on the Capitol, and spotlighting the security failures that exacerbated the violence. The panel has reviewed video from various sources, including security footage and the clips from HBO.
It’s the most detailed glimpse yet of Pelosi’s rushed evacuation from the Capitol, showcasing her deep discomfort at being forced to flee from the rioters — who she feared would see the evacuation as a twisted victory — and her insistence that Congress return to finish certifying the election. It also showed how her focus quickly shifted to impeaching Trump for a second time, an effort that was ultimately successful, as well as preparing to fire Capitol security officials who she believed mismanaged the threats to the building….
As she moved, Pelosi immediately inquired as to whether then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had approved a request for the National Guard. Her chief of staff, Terri McCullough, responded that he had. Moments later, a security official at Pelosi’s side informed her the pro-Trump mob had “already breached the Capitol.”
At first, Pelosi scolded security officials for forcing her evacuation. “I did not appreciate this,” she said. “I do not support this.”
“If they stop the proceedings, they will have succeeded in stopping the validation of the presidency of the United States,” she added. Pelosi then lit into Capitol security officials for failing to anticipate the attack.
“How many times did the members ask, ‘Are we prepared? Are we prepared?’ We’re not prepared for the worst,” Pelosi continued. “We’re calling the National Guard, now? It should’ve been here to start out. I just don’t understand it. Why do we empower people this way by not being ready?”
Of course we now know that Trump loyalists prevented the National Guard from being deployed for several hours. There’s much more at the link.
Hours after a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and assaulted dozens of police officers in an attempt to reach members of Congress, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then the House speaker, referred to the then-president as “a domestic enemy.”
The comments came in video shot by documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, Pelosi’s daughter, that HBO recently turned over to Congress. NBC News on Tuesday reviewed more than 30 minutes of video from the roughly 48 hours surrounding the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, including video that showed Pelosi being led away from the building by her security detail as she pressed her staff members to get the National Guard to respond to the Capitol.
The newly surfaced remarks go further than the public ones she made on Jan. 7, when she said Trump had “incited an armed insurrection against America” and “instigated” an attack that would “forever stain our nation’s history.”
“We take an oath to protect our country from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” she said. “There is a domestic enemy in the White House. And let’s not mince words about this.”
The previously unaired video also shows Pelosi taking responsibility for not pressing law enforcement officials harder about their preparations ahead of the attack.
“Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” Pelosi asked. “They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepared for more,” she said as she was being escorted away by security on Jan. 6. “It’s stupid that we should be in a situation like this.”
Pelosi would not have had independent authority to summon the National Guard, and the Capitol Police Board is in charge of security for the U.S. Capitol. The head of the Capitol Police resigned shortly after the riot, as did the House sergeant-at-arms, and the video shows Pelosi in discussions with her staff about getting resignations from both officials.
“They thought these people would act civilized? They thought these people gave a damn? What is it that is missing here in terms of anticipation?” she added….
The comments also indicate that Pelosi was skeptical about the motivations of the law enforcement community, which is generally conservative-leaning. (A high-ranking FBI official, for example, was warned in the hours after the attack that many within the bureau were “sympathetic” to the Capitol rioters.)
“Shame on us,” Pelosi said as her security unit whisked her off to nearby Fort McNair, where several congressional leaders ended up on the night of Jan. 6 when the facility turned into a command center for those in the order of presidential succession. “Shame on us. I’m suspicious of them and their motivations, tell you the truth.”
That’s three big stories to chew on. What do you think?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
This is what we will have after January 20,2025, which is, ironically enough, not only the inauguration of the first felon to ever hold office but also the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King. Somewhere, the Greek Muses have entered the realm of Greek Tragedy. All we need is a chorus.
That’s a sunny note to start your weekend on. Wait, there’s more! If you want to see real pearl-clutching, you must go to WAPO or NYT. But they’re a little too late for me. Here’s something from 
A quick look at several of the appointments finds quite a few rapists and serial adulterers. Trump obviously wants mini-mes. The BBC has this list up to date and is waiting for more. 
Gaetz is playing Rocky and is already running up and down the Capitol stairs trying to find the few people that like him. But even the 
That guy puts the sleaze in sleazy. Plus, he was investigated for war crimes and would be in charge of dealing with war criminals. This is from 
This is from 
DonOld is asking for a sitdown with Rupert Murdoch. This is from 
Salon Fellow Griffin Eckstein reports that Faux News Reader Brett Baier is very sorry about his behavior during his interview with Vice President Harris. 
Even the 
All of this makes me wonder if he doesn’t care about winning or if he’s just relying on a country-wide repeat J6 event and his cronies planted in positions to disrupt the voting process in many states. It might be he has other things on his rapidly disintegrating mind. Just a few hours ago, Judge Tanya Chutkin, keeper of the American Way and the U.S. Constitution, allowed the Special Counsel to open up the floodgates of evidence. 
This was a big news dump week. Hopefully, the death of Yahya Sinwar will lead to a peaceful conclusion to this latest Mid-Eastern War. I’m not sure that’s what Bibi wants, but I’m sure the return of the hostages and a ceasefire would be a good start to ending hostilities. This is from Reuters.
“This is a very big year, it is a very important election,” former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori told CNN’s Alex Marquardt on Tuesday. “This case is at stake in the election, because if Trump wins, it is going away. If Trump loses to Harris, this case is going to proceed to some sort of conclusion.”
The newly surfaced remarks go further than 
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