“No big surprise to MAGA. Things are getting interesting.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
These posts get more challenging to write each day. This year has been tough on everyone. I haven’t thought about weekends spent watching TV sitcoms with a limited choice of three channels in a while. My only TV is still sitting in its box, untouched. That about sums up my relationship with the old-school way of getting news and entertainment. I’d rather play my guitar or piano, create another watercolor of an old New Orleans building, or walk my dog than stay glued to it the way I did as a kid. However, I grew up in an area where there was not much else to do than join the family to stare into fake realities.
I will admit to spending way too much time on my cellphone or computer now. I can find many better things out there with a virtual library and the chance to interact with friends all over the world. It’s so damn cold out there now that I rushed the walk to sit here and stare at another sort’ve screen. The one that lets me read magazines and newspapers without getting black ink all over my fingers.
Of course, my entire family watched All in the Family. I admit that The Mary Tyler Moore Show was my favorite, and when I briefly moved to Minneapolis, I had to throw my hat in the air and visit the house on Lake Harriet that was used to style the set. Dick Van Dyke turned 100 this week. Rob Reiner and his wife lost their lives. This year has been full of days I’d rather forget. Family violence is all too common. We still don’t do well helping people with mental health and drug issues. Here’s the headline from USA Today. “Rob Reiner, wife Michele Singer’s son in custody – Live updates.”
Their deaths continue to be under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department after the couple was found dead in their home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. In a press conference on Sunday night, the LAPD said the robbery-homicide division will continue to investigate through the night and expect to release more information in the morning.
Authorities confirmed that “many family members” will be interviewed in the course of their work and that they were obtaining a search warrant to conduct a full crime scene investigation. They did not comment on the injuries sustained by Reiner and Singer.
USA TODAY was unable to reach a representative for Reiner at the time of publication.
The L.A. Times has background on Nick Reiner. “What we know about Nick Reiner, who struggled with addiction and shared his recovery with the world.”
Nick Reiner spent years struggling with addiction and with help from his father, Hollywood legend Rob Reiner, told his story to the world.
On Monday, Nick was booked into the L.A. County jail on suspicion of murder, hours after Reiner and his wife were found dead inside their Brentwood home.
Nick cycled in and out of rehab centers and experienced bouts of homelessness as a teenager.
He had gotten clean by 2015, when he worked with his father on “Being Charlie,” a semi-autobiographical film about addiction and recovery. Rob Reiner directed and Nick co-wrote the film about a successful actor with political ambitions and a son addicted to drugs.
Many aspects of the movie were inspired by Nick’s relationship with his father — including a line where the father character tells his son, “I’d rather you hate me and you be alive.” Nick said in a 2016 interview with AOL that he “didn’t bond a lot” with his father while he was growing up.
Nick gave an interview about “Being Charlie” alongside his family at the Toronto Film Festival in 2015, saying that his decision to quit heroin was driven by a practical realization.
“I got sick of doing that,” he told The Times. “I come from a nice family. I’m not supposed to be out there on the streets and in homeless shelters doing all these … things.”
During the interview, Rob said he regretted valuing the advice of counselors over the voice of his son.
“When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen,” he said. “We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”
Michele added: “We were so influenced by these people. They would tell us he’s a liar, that he was trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.”
Nick talked about the many different rehab centers and programs he tried without success. In 2016, he told People magazine that he lived on the streets because he refused to go to the rehab facilities his parents recommended.
“If I wanted to do it my way and not go to the programs they were suggesting, then I had to be homeless,” he said.
He told the magazine that he could have died on the streets.
“It’s all luck,” he said. “You roll the dice and you hope you make it.”
It’s remarkable to me that we frequently discuss the American Dream, yet it seems we lack a clear understanding of what that means. We’ve been shaped by SitComs, schools, political parties, and many other things that have left us in the dark about the very nature of our lives. Perhaps it is time to find some better ways.
I’ll keep this post brief today. Most days, I struggle to make sense of things. That’s been the reality of 2025. The reality of 2025 is also one filled with friends locked in their homes and neighbors struggling to protect themselves from our own government. I’m going to take a few days to just bake bread and sit down in front of a TV, not my own, and see if the offerings have improved. Fortunately for me, I’ve found the films of Guillermo del Toro on my last such adventure. I’m hoping to discover more. The documentary about him is also a solid watch. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually watched something without wanting to grab my cell phone instead. That’s a far road from the sixteen-year-old me and the TV console in our family room. Being with friends always brings a good end to a bad year.
So, one more read about today’s media. This is from Dr. Paul Krugman. “MAGA, the Broligarchs and the Media, This isn’t just about business; it’s about democracy.” Be sure to refer to the chart as you read.
Warner Bros. Discovery, which among other things controls CNN, has agreed to sell itself to Netflix. But it isn’t a done deal, because Paramount has made a rival, hostile bid.
Now, most Americans, even those like me who pay a lot of attention to the economy, don’t usually take much interest in insider baseball about corporate wheeling and dealing. But this is a bigger story than usual, for three reasons.
First, there’s an antitrust issue. In an earlier era, when the U.S. government took monopoly power seriously, both proposed acquisitions would probably have been blocked by regulators.
Second, there’s a financial issue. On its own, there is no way that Paramount, which is deeply in debt and whose credit rating is “a notch below ‘junk’” could afford to buy Warner. It’s able to make a semi-credible bid only because of assurances of support from Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men thanks to his stake in the software giant Oracle. But when analysts look closely at the details, they find that Ellison’s promises of support are more than a bit squirrely:
[T]he Warner Bros. Discovery board worried that Mr. Ellison did not personally guarantee the bid under his name and is planning to contribute equity for the deal through a trust with holdings that could be modified at any time.
Adding to the risk of Oracle’s deal is the fact that Oracle is itself shaky according to the estimation of gimlet-eyed financial markets due to its huge, debt-financed bets on AI.
As Bloomberg reports, its investment grade debt now “trades like junk.”
But it’s not just about the money. For the average American, there is something fundamentally important about this corporate cage-match to win Warner Bros. Discovery. And it’s not about entertainment, it’s about democracy. You should understand that Paramount’s hostile bid is, above all, a political move in the pursuit of cementing the dominance of MAGA-supporting tech billionaires and further eroding American democracy.
Back in 2018, during Trump I, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, which described how nations like Hungary had descended into one-party authoritarianism although the formal, but now toothless, institutions of democracy remain. In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Levitsky, Ziblatt and Lucan Way say that this process is already well underway here in the U.S.:
In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.
Now, in some ways America is unusually well-positioned to resist this authoritarian push. As Levitsky et al note, we have a “well-organized and rich civil society” — ranging from law firms to universities to nonprofits — that can push back. And while some of these institutions are led by cowards, not all are. We also have unified political opposition in the form of the Democratic Party, which is very different from the splintered opposition thatfaced Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example.
Yet, ominously, Trump and Trumpism have powerful allies that had no counterpart in previous competitive authoritarian regimes. Namely, there is a network of deeply anti-democratic tech billionaires, of which Ellison is a very significant player. The Authoritarian Stack project,which tracks that network, calls it the “Authoritarian Tech Right”. I’ve put their chart of some of the keyplayers at the top of this post. Some of us refer to that network, less formally, as the “broligarchy.”
Have a good week!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging List today?
TRIGGER WARNING!
Really hate to add this, but this is what Trump had to say today. What an asshole!
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
It is Sunday, and I have a lot of instagram post for you today so you may want to reload the page now…that way you have a chance to get these embedded post loaded correctly.
So, an iconic British comedian passed away this week:
The iconic Scottish actor and comedian Stanley Baxter has died at the age of 99Born in Glasgow in 1926, Baxter entertained audiences of up to 20 million people during his career which started at the age of six in Paisley
In 2020, Stanley Baxter received BAFTA Scotland's Outstanding Contribution to Film & Television award.Baxter, who has died at the age of 99, said: "There was always a worry that they might find it too broad, but I knew damn well that Scots are able to laugh at themselves."And so it proved to be"
The description “special” is overused in television schedules; Stanley Baxter’s programmes justify it. The comedian is one of the few stars whose reputation rests on a handful of astonishing one-offs – standalone comic extravaganzas screened in the 1970s and 1980s, first by ITV’s London Weekend Television and then the BBC.
In both cases, the networks ended their associations with Baxter not because of lack of audience interest – at their peak, the shows reached more than 20 million viewers – but due to the colossal costs demanded by the performer’s vast and perfectionist visual ambition. One of Baxter’s favourite conceits was to re-create, in witty pastiche, scenes from big-budget Hollywood movies that made it look as if his versions had also spent millions of dollars.
Cashflow was further stretched by the fact that Baxter played multiple roles – 18 of them in one sketch. Recent digital technology has made such multiplications relatively easy, but at the time Baxter was sharing a screen with several selves, primitive image-mixing technology left a giveaway outline – like the chalk marks homicide cops put around a corpse on the sidewalk – when scenes recorded at different times were merged together.
But his drag performances are the ones that truly stand out…
A surprise to those rewatching TV comedy from the 1960s to 1980s is the prevalence of drag acting. This was largely necessity. Because almost all star comedians were male but their material often involved marriage and/or misogyny, light entertainment resembled an all-boys school trying to put on a production of The Trojan Women. But, whereas frequent cross-dressers such as Les Dawson, Dick Emery and Terry Jones were built to play somewhat squat matriarchs, Baxter had calves and ankles of such unusual shapeliness for a man that he could plausibly portray superstar actresses of the Hollywood golden age. When he portrayed Fred Astaire, he could also play his dance partner, Ginger Rogers.
In a 2019 Channel 5 profile in the Comedy National Treasures strand, the then 93-year-old Baxter explained that he did detailed impressions of Hollywood legends before knowing who they were. His mother, who had been prevented from becoming an actor by parents who believed that the profession was a euphemism for prostitution, trained Stanley from a very young age to entertain relatives and friends with versions of her favourite chanteuses, such as Marlene Dietrich and Gracie Fields. As her son had never seen nor heard the originals, she would do impersonations for him, from which he would create his own version. In retrospect, this was another key stage in the development of his exceptional ability to re-create cinematic scenes.
I think a great example of this is his play on Upstairs Downstairs:
Innit magic?
RIP Stanley Baxter.www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio…
Stanley, a comedy icon across generations, made his final major television appearance in a celebratory documentary 'Being Stanley Baxter', which WAS scheduled to air on BBC Scotland on December 31, 2025, as he approached his 100th birthday.He had a great life!uk.news.yahoo.com/tributes-pai…
Trump is still “president,” and he continues to do terrible things; but there are beginning to be a few positive signs that his grip on the GOP is waning as his approval ratings continue to drop. One of those signs is the refusal of Republicans in the state senate to follow his demand for redistricting. As some people here know, I grew up in Indiana. I can’t help feeling a bit of Hoosier pride about this.
If Indiana Republican senators had any doubt about what to do with President Donald Trump’s redistricting proposal, he helped them make up their minds the night before this week’s vote.
In a social media screed, Trump accused the state’s top senator of being “a bad guy, or a very stupid one.”
“That kind of language doesn’t help,” said Sen. Travis Holdman, a banker and lawyer from near Fort Wayne who voted against the plan.
He was among 21 Republican senators who dealt Trump one of the most significant political defeats of his second term by rejecting redistricting in Indiana. The decision undermined the president’s national campaign to redraw congressional maps to boost his party’s chances in the upcoming midterm elections.
In interviews after Thursday’s vote, several Republican senators said they were leaning against the plan from the start because their constituents didn’t like it. But in a Midwest nice rebuttal to America’s increasingly coarse political discourse, some said they simply didn’t like the president’s tone, like when he called senators “suckers.”
Trump didn’t seem to get the message. Asked about the vote, the president once again took aim at Indiana’s top senator, Rodric Bray.
“He’ll probably lose his next primary, whenever that is,” Trump said. “I hope he does, because he’s done a tremendous disservice.”
Sen. Sue Glick, an attorney from La Grange who also opposed redistricting, brushed off Trump’s threat to unseat lawmakers who defied him.
“I would think he would have better things to do,” she said. “It would be money better spent electing the individuals he wants to represent his agenda in Congress.”
My mother used to say that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Trump never learned that simple lesson.
In rejecting yesterday a redistricting plan backed by President Donald Trump, Indiana’s Republican-controlled senate did not merely deny Republicans two new U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections. They also engaged in a mass revolt against the president. The stakes of their defiance reach far beyond the midterms. This vote was possibly the most significant blow yet against the authoritarian ambitions that have defined Trump’s second term.
Tabby Cat. Benson b. Moore
The significance of Indiana’s noncompliance lies not in the specifics of what was refused—attempts to gerrymander electoral maps are hardly unprecedented, even though a mid-decade battle violates norms—but in the act of refusal itself. Trump’s authoritarian project relies on the cultlike hold he has over his party. Republicans have come to understand that the cost of defying Trump is the death of their political career. Trump has proved time and again that he will go to any lengths to destroy his intra-party critics, even if doing so harms the party.
That method was on vivid display in Indiana. Trump expected the state to go along with his plans to redraw its map to help his party in the midterms. When the state’s Republicans held back their support, Trump and his allies went on the attack.
Indiana Republican legislators faced bomb threats and intimidation in their homes (such as “swatting,” phone calls, and the like)—a climate of fear, my colleague Russell Berman reports, unlike anything the state has seen.
Heritage Action delivered a Mafia-like threat, as high-minded scholars apparently do these days: “President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.”
This kind of pressure typically bends targets to Trump’s will. What politician is willing to sacrifice their career or their family’s safety for a single act of defiance?
Yet the spines of Indiana Republicans stiffened where so many others snapped. One reason for this may be that the state contains an unusually strong concentration of Trump-skeptical former governors. Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence remain influential in the state, despite having given up national ambitions by failing to submit fully to Trump. Daniels praised the vote as an act of “principled courageous leadership.”
Indiana’s Republicans also demonstrated strength in numbers. Trump employs the psychology of a schoolyard bully who isolates and targets victims one by one. By engineering a 31–19 vote, Indiana’s Republicans worked together to ensure that no single legislator could be blamed for defying Trump.
Of course, every effort he makes to prove he’s not one step away from melting into a bubbling orange puddle seems to make it clearer that he’s losing it.
Gertrude Abercrombie, 17 Feb 1909 – 3 Apr 1977
As bad as all that is, however, MAGA may be collapsing even more quickly than its creator. Prominent Republicans are defecting—like Marjorie Taylor Greene—and more are rumored to be threatening to do likewise. More former loyalists are willing to stand up to him—whether Indiana legislators rejecting Trumpian demands that they gerrymander the state or GOP senators leading inquiries into the possibility that war crimes were committed as part of Trump’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” phase.
Others are speaking out against Trump’s opposition to extending vital health subsidies to Americans—including hardliners like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley—or to express their discomfort with new executive orders seeking to block states from enacting AI regulation.
Trump is losing in the courts. His illegal picks to be U.S. attorneys are being kicked out; his efforts to, well, trump up charges against opponents like James Comey and Letitia James have been shot down by grand juries that simply will not go along with cases so obviously fabricated and motivated by retribution rather than any respect for the law.
And he is losing at the ballot box. Recent election results suggest that the onetime star to whom so many MAGA upstarts have hitched their wagons to in the past decade is now electoral poison. Across the country, elections last month produced resounding defeats for the GOP, while in the few elections in which Republicans squeaked out victories, their margins shrank considerably compared to 2024 support for Trump.
The economy is floundering. Deficits are exploding. Tariffs are unpopular. Trump’s inhumane and draconian immigration crackdowns are alienating substantial numbers of his erstwhile supporters, while his foreign policy plans have alienated our allies and empowered our enemies. His overt corruption and catering to billionaires at the expense of average Americans is driving real backlash.
Donald Trump has fallen and, given projections of a rough year ahead, it seems increasingly likely that he can’t get up.
Believing in democracy does not require faith that majorities are always right. It does mean having confidence that most of your fellow citizens will, over time, approach public questions with a basic reasonableness. Abraham Lincoln, tradition has it, said it more pithily: “You cannot fool all the people all the time.”
A corollary to Lincoln, that you can’t fool all the people who voted for you all the time, explains the sharp decline in President Trump’s approval ratings.
Cat in Bamboo, Hiroshima, by Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani
A significant share of the voters who backed Mr. Trump have decided that he has largely ignored the primary issue that pushed them his way, the cost of living. A billionaire regularly mocking concern about affordability only makes matters worse. They see him as distracted by personal obsessions and guilty of overreach, even when they sympathize with his objectives. Many of his former supporters see him breaking promises he made, notably on not messing with their access to health care.
Some abuses are too blatant to be ignored. A recent The Economist/You Gov poll found that 56 percent of Americans said Mr. Trump was using his office for personal gain; only 32 percent didn’t. A similar 56 percent saw Mr. Trump as directing the Justice Department to go after people he saw as his political enemies; just 24 percent didn’t.
The upshot: A great many Americans who helped put Mr. Trump in office have absorbed what’s happened since. They may not be glued to every chaotic twist of this presidency, but they do pay attention and have concluded, reasonably, that this is not what they voted for.
How many? Let’s take Mr. Trump’s 49.8 percent of the 2024 popular vote as a base line and compare it with his approval ratings. A New York Times analysis of public polling this month found his net approval rating had dropped to 42 percent. A A.P./NORC poll and a Gallup poll pegged it at 36 percent. This suggests that 15 to 25 percent of his voters have changed their minds
I think of these shifts as the triumph of reasonableness — and not because I agree with where these fellow citizens have landed (although I do). I’m buoyed by the capacity of citizens to absorb new facts and take in information even when it challenges decisions they previously made. It turns out that swing voters are what their label implies. The evidence of their own lives and from their own eyes matters.
Use the gift link to read the rest.
So, there really are some positive signs.
Republicans also continue to hurt themselves by refusing to help millions of Americans who are about to lose access to health care because of the drastically increased costs Republicans instituted with their Big Ugly Bill.
For one Wisconsin couple, the loss of government-sponsored health subsidies next year means choosing a lower-quality insurance plan with a higher deductible. For a Michigan family, it means going without insurance altogether.
For a single mom in Nevada, the spiking costs mean fewer Christmas gifts this year. She is stretching her budget already while she waits to see if Congress will act.
The Senate on Thursday rejected two proposals to address the problem and an emerging health care package from House Republicans does not include an extension, all but guaranteeing that many Americans will see much higher insurance costs in 2026.
Young Cat Sleeping, by Mabel Wellington Jack
Here are a few of their stories.
Chad Bruns comes from a family of savers. That came in handy when the 58-year-old military veteran had to leave his firefighting career early because of arm and back injuries he incurred on the job.
He and his wife, Kelley, 60, both retirees, cut their own firewood to reduce their electricity costs in their home in Sawyer County, Wisconsin. They rarely eat out and hardly ever buy groceries unless they are on sale.
But to the extent that they have always been frugal, they will be forced to be even more so now, Bruns said. That is because their coverage under the health law enacted under former President Barack Obama is getting more expensive -– and for worse coverage.
This year, the Brunses were paying $2 per month for a top-tier gold-level plan with less than a $4,000 deductible. Their income was low enough to help them qualify for a lot of financial assistance.
But in 2026, that same plan is rising to an unattainable $1,600 per month, forcing them to downgrade to a bronze plan with a $15,000 deductible.
Kelley Bruns said she is concerned that if something happens to their health in the next year, they could go bankrupt. While their monthly fees are low at about $25, their new out-of-pocket maximum at $21,000 amounts to nearly half their joint income.
“We have to pray that we don’t have to have surgery or don’t have to have some medical procedure done that we’re not aware of,” she said. “It would be very devastating.”
Read more health care stories a the link.
Speaker Mike Johnson will allow a vote on an Obamacare extension next week, but it is expected to fail. From Politico:
House GOP leadership will permit a floor vote to extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies — an olive branch to moderate members who have been clamoring for a chance to go on record in support of an extension.
“The process” for considering that package “will allow” a vote on an amendment to prevent the subsidies from lapsing Dec. 31, according to a House Republican leadership aide granted anonymity to share the unannounced plans.
It’s a concession from leaders who have been reluctant to endorse an extension of the subsidies, which divides congressional Republicans. It’s a win for centrists and vulnerable incumbents, who see political peril in not acting on the tax credits and have been promising to push discharge petitions that would circumvent leadership and force votes on their own legislative proposals.
Speaker Mike Johnson and senior Republicans met Friday morning on the topic to chart a path forward.
But Republicans leaders ultimately expect the extension vote to fail, resulting in skyrocketing premiums for millions of Americans when the subsidies expire at the end of the year.
The Senate failed to get anywhere on the health care issue this week. Now it’s the House’s turn to show what it can do.
Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled a Republican alternative late Friday, a last-minute sprint as his party refuses to extend the enhanced tax subsidies for those who buy policies through the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, which are expiring at the end of the year. Those subsidies help lower the cost of coverage.
Two Cats, Eleanore G. Cohen
Johnson, R-La., huddled behind closed doors in the morning — as he did days earlier this week — working to assemble the package for consideration as the House focuses the final days of its 2025 work on health care.
“House Republicans are tackling the real drivers of health care costs to provide affordable care,” Johnson said in a statement announcing the package. He said it would be voted on next week.
Later Friday, though, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “House Republicans have introduced toxic legislation that is completely unserious, hurts hardworking America taxpayers and is not designed to secure bipartisan support. If the bill reaches the House floor, I will strongly oppose it.”
So what’s the GOP plan?
The House Republicans offered a 100-plus-page package that focuses on long-sought GOP proposals to enhance access to employer-sponsored health insurance plans and clamp down on so-called pharmacy benefit managers.
Republicans propose expanding access to what’s referred to as association health plans, which would allow more small businesses and self-employed individuals to band together and purchase health coverage.
Proponents say such plans increase the leverage businesses have to negotiate a lower rate. But critics say the plans provide skimpier coverage than what is required under the Affordable Care Act.
The Republicans’ proposal would also require more data from pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, as a way to help control drug costs. Critics say PBMs have padded their bottom line and made it more difficult for independent pharmacists to survive.
Additionally, the GOP plan includes mention of cost-sharing reductions for some lower-income people who rely on Obamacare, but those do not take effect until January 2027.
The emerging package from the House Republicans does not include an extension of an enhanced tax credit for millions of Americans who get insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Put in place during the COVID-19 crisis, that enhanced subsidy expires Dec. 31, leaving most families in the program facing more than double their current out-of-pocket premiums, and in some cases, much more.
I think Republicans will find that this issue will destroy them in the midterm elections.
That’s all I have for today. I tried to stick with somewhat positive stories. (FYI, the images in this post comes from the Smithsonian collection of cat art.)
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
I think we can agree that the year 2025 has sucked so much that our ears are ringing. Most of today’s headlines are going to follow us into the New Year, too. I’m going to try to be gentle, but wow. At least we see karma catching up with some of them. I hate to spoil your meals for the day. Any survivors of sexual trauma and assault may want to take the day off to breathe deeply and prepare for the new information that will start pouring in. This CNN story is both welcome and as horrifying as we thought it would be. “New photos released from Epstein’s estate showing Trump, Bannon, Bill Clinton, and other high-profile people.” We’ve known these connections, but when will we find out how lurid they go?
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released photos from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate Friday showing the many powerful figures in the late sex trafficker’s orbit, including President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and others.
Many of the men have been previously linked to Epstein, though the photos may shed new light on the extent of those relationships.
Taken collectively, the 19 images – which the Democrats on the committee said came from Epstein’s estate – reinforce the financier was tied in the past to a wide variety of powerful and high-profile people whose ties to him are now under significant scrutiny.
One released image shows Trump with six women with leis whose faces were redacted by committee members, while another depicts what appears to be a bowl of novelty condoms with a caricature of Trump’s face with the text, “I’m HUUUUGE!” The condoms – shown in a bowl with a “Trump condom $4.50” sign – were produced by a novelty shop in New York City named Fishs Eddy. The item is described as a “political satire condom” in the National Museum of American History’s online collection.
Other released images depict Steve Bannon and Epstein taking a photograph in a mirror; Bill Clinton with Epstein, Maxwell and another couple; and tech billionaire Bill Gates with the former Prince Andrew. Former Harvard President Larry Summers and lawyer Alan Dershowitz also appeared in pictures from the estate.
None of the released images depict any sexual misconduct nor are believed to depict underage girls. It was not immediately clear when or where they were taken, or by whom.
Politico also has coverage of the basic picture dump. “Trump, Clinton, Gates included in Epstein photo trove. The House Oversight Committee Democrats released photos from the Epstein estate linking powerful men to the late convicted sex offender.” You’ll notice in this coverage, the photos have black squares covering the faces of the victims. More on that in the next suggested read.
Photos from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein tie the convicted sex offender to President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, tech billionaire Bill Gates and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
These men and others are featured in the roughly 95,000 photos the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has received from the Epstein estate as part of its ongoing investigation. House Democrats publicly released 19 photos Friday morning.
“It is time to end this White House cover-up and bring justice to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends,” the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, said in a statement. “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all the files, NOW.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement accused Democrats of “selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions.”
“The Democrat hoax against President Trump has been repeatedly debunked and the Trump Administration has done more for Epstein’s victims than Democrats ever have by repeatedly calling for transparency, releasing thousands of pages of documents, and calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends,” she continued. “It’s time for the media to stop regurgitating Democrat talking points and start asking Democrats why they wanted to hang around Epstein after he was convicted.”
Secret grand jury transcripts from Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking case can be made public, a judge ruled on Wednesday, joining two other judges in granting the Justice Department’s requests to unseal material from investigations into the late financier’s sexual abuse.
U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman reversed his earlier decision to keep the material under wraps, citing a new law that requires the government to open its files on Epstein and his longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell. The judge previously cautioned that the 70 or so pages of grand jury materials slated for release are hardly revelatory and “merely a hearsay snippet” of Epstein’s conduct.
The Justice Department asked the judges to lift secrecy orders in the cases after the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump last month, created a narrow exception to rules that normally keep grand jury proceedings confidential. The law requires that the Justice Department disclose Epstein-related material to the public by Dec. 19.
More things will undoubtedly be released. Finally, we see some action from those of us who strongly believe in the preservation of our historical and geographical moments, parks, and buildings. The Washington Post has the story on this good news. “National Trust sues to stop Trump’s ballroom construction. The organization, which is charged by Congress with historic preservation, has retained President Barack Obama’s former lawyer as it seeks to pause the project.”
Historic preservationists begged President Donald Trump in October not to rapidly demolish the White House’s East Wing annex for his ballroom project, urging him to wait for federal review panels and allow the public to weigh in. Now a group charged by Congress with helping to preserve historic buildings is asking a judge to block construction until those reviews occur, arguing that the ongoing project is illegal and unconstitutional.
The lawsuit from the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, represents the first major legal challenge to Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot addition and is poised to test the limits of his power. The organization argues that the administration failed to undergo legally required reviews or receive congressional authorization for the project, which Trump has rushed to launch in hopes of completing it before his term ends in 2029.
“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever — not President Trump, not President Joe Biden, and not anyone else,” the complaint says.
The administration in October rapidly demolished the East Wing to make way for the ballroom over the objections of the National Trust and other historic preservationists who urged the White House to pause its demolition, submit its plans to the National Capital Planning Commission and seek public comment.
“She’s like the Energizer Bunny.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Finally, we should see the release of the first true face of the assault on our nation’s immigrant population. This is also from the AP. “Federal judge issues order to prohibit immigration officials from detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia.”
To let you know exactly how jumpy we are down here about these things, I’ll share this short tale this morning from Temple’s morning walk. I was talking to my neighbor, who had just come back from walking Dame Maggie, his Yorkie. I was just saying goodbye to her when a white SUV stopped in front of the house with the cherries flashing. I gulped noticeably. Josh closed the door, and I walked down the street towards the river and crossed to the neutral ground behind the line forming. I spoke with the woman in the car for a bit. The first thought that hit both of us was ICE, but after a bit of worrying, we decided it was just someone who had to return to the construction at the base. We were all white, and thankfully, none of our neighborhood’s gardeners or construction workers were around. All of us thought the same thing, though. This is not normal. And yes, I am still actively in the resistance.
A federal judge blocked U.S. immigration authorities on Friday from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia, saying she feared they might take him into custody again just hours after she had ordered his release from a detention center.
The order came as Abrego Garcia appeared at a scheduled appointment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office roughly 14 hours after he walked out of immigration detention facility in Pennsylvania.
His lawyers had sent an urgent request to the judge, warning that ICE officials could immediately place him back into custody. Instead, Abrego Garcia exited the building after a short appointment, emerging to cheers from supporters who had gathered outside.
Speaking briefly to the crowd, he urged others to “stand tall” against what he described as injustices carried out by the government.
Officials cannot re-detain him until the court conducts a hearing on the motion for the temporary restraining order, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland said. She wrote that Abrego Garcia is likely to succeed on the merits of any further request for relief from ICE detention.
ProPublicaremains my go-to source for uncovering outrageous abnormalities within the Trump administration. Keeping eyes on our Department of Justice (sic) is a necessary and noble cause. “The Shakedown: Trump’s DOJ Pressured Lawyers to ‘Find’ Evidence That UCLA Had Illegally Tolerated Antisemitism.” I’m not sure why Anti-Semitism remains the only “woke” policy this regime recognizes.
On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.
Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.
He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration.
The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.
In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education,based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, revealsthe extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system’s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration’s tactics brought into sharp focus.
According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly “find” evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes.
The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA, which had been rocked by pro-Palestinian protests in the spring of 2024. But even that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration investigation based on the same incidents. The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening.
This is a long read, but well worth your time. I leave you with a personal story from Facebook of a Father of a Daughter. Matthew Berdyck is one of those smart asses like me. He and his daughter are currently under attack by MAGA bullies. I know what it’s like to have your daughter stalked by folks like these. My youngest was three at the time, the so-called church people, and “right-to-lifers”. It has only gotten worse over time. I can only tell you how much my heart goes out to him and his family. I got nightly phone calls telling me exactly where my daughter had been all day and telling me what an after-birth “abortion” would look like if performed on her. The Sheriff’s department told me I shouldn’t take these people seriously when I called to complain. That was 1992.
92 days after Charlie Kirk’s death, I finally understand.
When I saw the news reports that Charlie Kirk was shot, I didn’t know who he was. At first, I spoke out against his shooting because I get threatened a lot myself—killing people over political speech is well beyond reasonable.
Over the last 92 days, as my profile got bigger and bigger, I became subject to ongoing and continuing rage from the right. Boy, do they just love making jokes but start crying that they’re victims when someone gives them back what they dish out. Babies.
They’re gonna “get them dems,” but if someone gets them back, oh lord, the temper tantrum is going to be epic and heard all the way to dwarf-planet Pluto.
Over the last 92 days, I’ve had over 25,000 vitriolic comments from MAGA—I’m gay, I’m a lady, I’m a beta-male cuck, I’m a pedo, and on and on. At minimum, they’re just name-calling, but at worst they’re targeting my 17-year-old daughter like predators.
Currently, on my wall, there are hundreds of sexual comments about her, repeated threats to kill her, threats to hurt my 70-year-old mom, even a threat to dox and hurt my 94-year-old grandfather.
I’ve got 55 harassing voicemails, I’ve been subscribed to gay porn sites, cuckold newsletters, received spam from life insurance companies (death threats)—like, wow, these people are throwing a massive, uncontrollable fit over comedy.
I realize today, after 92 solid days of relentless, aggressive harassment, that I’m not even remotely shocked that someone offed Kirk. In fact, I’m actually surprised someone didn’t do it sooner.
These MAGA are rabid animals. Kirk was their demigod, Agent Orange.
Today, yet another one of them threatened my daughter and me—like, bro, you’re a real big man threatening a little girl, but that’s what MAGA is about.
It’s who they always were and it’s who they always will be, all the way to the day they’re voted out by the rest of us.
If one day I stop posting, then I guess I am Charlie Kirk—after I’ve been shot by some far-right, grammarless dingleberry honkeytron who couldn’t take a joke.
Follow me if you feel me.Update:
They’re already in the comments denying all of this happened even though it’s all visible on this page 💀💀
I can only tell you that any time you go after the blind followers of an autocratic cult, it ain’t gonna be pretty at all. I have some time off, and I have found all the good trouble I need to end the year on a high note.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging List today?
Well, I’ve seen all there is to see
And I’ve heard all they have to say
I’ve done everything I wanted to do
I’ve done that too
And it ain’t that pretty at all
Ain’t that pretty at all
So I’m gonna hurl myself against the wall
‘Cause I’d rather feel bad than not feel anything at all
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Of course, my entire family watched 
The L.A. Times
I’ll keep this post brief today. Most days, I struggle to make sense of things. That’s been the reality of 2025. The reality of 2025 is also one filled with friends locked in their homes and neighbors struggling to protect themselves from our own government. I’m going to take a few days to just bake bread and sit down in front of a TV, not my own, and see if the offerings have improved. Fortunately for me, I’ve found the films of 
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
More things will undoubtedly be released. Finally, we see some action from those of us who strongly believe in the preservation of our historical and geographical moments, parks, and buildings. The
ProPublica 
This is a long read, but well worth your time. I leave you with a personal story from Facebook of a Father of a Daughter. 
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments