What’s the world coming to when you have a billionaire crony buy a major news network, appoint a reliable political ally as news editor-in-chief, and they still report this kind of ugly, critical shit about you? From Heather Cox Richardson:
Daniel Klaidman, Michael Kaplan, and Matt Gutman of CBS News reported that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after a federal raid on a popular horse racing venue in Wilder, Idaho, led to the detention of 105 undocumented immigrants as well as the temporary detention of 375 U.S. citizens or lawful residents. Only five arrests ended in criminal charges, all for unlicensed gambling.
Answering allegations that agents had used zip ties on children, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office in Boise and Homeland Security spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin flatly denied the allegations. “ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain, or arrest any children,” she said. “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children. This is the kind of garbage rhetoric contributing to our officers facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.” But after photographic evidence of zip-tie bruises on a 14-year-old female U.S. citizen as well as personal testimony, the FBI changed their assertion to say no “young” children were zip-tied.
An 8,000% increase in “death threats” against Trump’s violent, armed for insurrection Ku Klux Klan brigades? That’s almost as high as the 9,000% reduction in my drug prices under the most transparent, generous and loving president in world history. All that cash they send me every month is making me not care so much about civil liberties anymore, as long as those fat checks keep rolling in. Still, some part of me still notices there’s not a peep in the corporate media, or anywhere else, really, about the steady number of actual military veterans who kill themselves every day in the US. It adds up to around 6,000 a year.
More than 6,000 veterans have died by suicide each year since 2001, with the figure peaking in 2018 at 6,738 deaths. The slight decrease in 2023 follows the downward trend since 2018. source
Thank you for your service, loser.
As for actual total losers, nobody is reporting how many hundreds of thousands of poor, “nonwhite” children Elon and Donald continue to gleefully kill by slashing USAID funding and putting Little Marco in charge of closing it down completely. The shameful, quiet mass slaughter was discussed in the press briefly after The Lancet’s recently produced report projecting more than twenty million additional deaths (on top of the between 500,000 and 1,000,000 already dead in 2025) that will occur in the next four years. Here’s Little Marco, for the defense of Ayn Rand’s strong-get-to-fuck-the-weak view of the world:
Asked about the study, a senior US State Department Official called The Lancet a “failed journal” and said: “Some recent ‘studies’ are rooted in outdated thinking, insisting that the old and inefficient global development system is the only solution to human suffering. This is simply not true.”
“Rather than helping recipient countries help themselves, the old system created a global culture of dependency, compounded by significant inefficiency and waste. This has prompted development donors everywhere – not just the United States – to reconsider their approach to foreign aid,” the senior official added. Last July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the new approach as “prioritizing trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance.” source
And finally, the latest in Epstein/Trump news, Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) with a nice summary of the facts of the coverup and the always outraged, tantrum pitching Pam Bondi burning him for blasphemy. She had previously screamed at lawyer and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin (D-Md) ” ‘You don’t tell me anything, you washed up loser! You’re not even a lawyer!” You can google that yourself, Pam.
Fascists do not compromise, being uncompromising is their brand. Fascism, militaristic rule by state violence, backed by corporate power, is based on a relentless appeal to terror. Being terror-based, fascism never needs to articulate a rational set of beliefs based on observable reality — no argument is allowed in a fascist state. A terrified populace is ready for the protection of a “strongman,” a leader who will never yield or bend. That these strongmen are, in fact, the weakest and neediest (and generally the most insane) people in history, is obscured during their reigns by the irrationality they unleash among a public scared out of its collective wits. A fascist ruler never compromises, about anything, ever — hence “strongman”. An angry two-year old never compromises while raging either, but nobody confuses an enraged toddler with an all powerful being. Unless your critical faculties have been disabled by a crippling fear of death, in which case that infuriated toddler has every right to rule.
Fred Koch, wealthy father of the most influential fascist of the American rightwing, billionaire polluter/”philanthropist” Charles, was essentially a Nazi. The German nanny Fred hired for his four boys (as he built the fuel refineries that kept Hitler’s Luftwaffe in business throughout the war), a stern disciplinarian who required the young brothers to defecate on a strict schedule, ran back to Germany to be with her beloved Fuhrer, after his blitzkreig conquered France. Fred Koch inspired his boys to fight, to compete for dominance. The two history recalls as The Koch Brothers, Charles and David, ruthlessly fought their brothers in court for decades and essentially prevailed. You can read the sickening details of how this psychotic father replicated himself in his two “strongest” offspring in Jane Mayer’s masterful Dark Money. David, backed by Koch money, ran for vice president in 1980, on the Libertarian ticket. The Kochs got an appropriate 1% of the national vote for the millions they spent on the campaign. Charles, a brilliant and dogged engineer, got to work building, testing and constantly correcting a vast anti-democratic machine to influence public opinion, frame every public issue to suit his private passions, pass unpopular legislation, defeat regulations to protect air, water and biodiversity, gain control of the federal judiciary (he succeeded 100% with the 6-3 ideologically pure Federalist Society Supreme Court) and so on.
A step back into the America that MAGA wants to make great again, back to the days before “judicial activism” destroyed our great nation. 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court, after hearing the arguments, ruled that “separate but equal” in America’s racially segregated public schools was a crock of shit. They ordered “desegregation” of all American public schools be carried out “with all deliberate speed”. The speed was deliberate enough that racists went to work to make sure their children never had to sit in the same classroom as non-white children. The public school I attended was not integrated until 1964. That school, one of the top rated public schools in New York, was the elementary school Trump would likely have attended, he could have walked there from the house he grew up in less than ten minutes. His psychotic father had other plans for his sadistic young son.
American racists were outraged at the “judicial activism” of the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. It made no difference to them that the decision was based on a rational evaluation of the evidence presented, in fact, that made it 100 times worse. In response to this judicial act of “communist” sabotage, brought by Negroes and their race traitor allies against a school board 146 miles from his hometown of Wichita, Fred Koch and several wealthy industrialist fellow travelers founded The John Birch Society, a far right-wing fringe group still in operation today. You can visit their website. Once the lunatic fringe of the right wing, which Republican politicians and pundits were always careful to distance themselves from, JBS, as they brand themselves now, is mainstream MAGA, the quivering heart of the present day Republican Party. Check out this photo, the first thing you see when you open their homepage:
A Who’s Who of popular (and obscure– who are those two on the right?) American fascists. These extremists have a vision, as you can see bullet-pointed above. A white Christian oligarchy where none of our most entitled and deserving “legacy” citizens ever have to hear whining from “communists” and other sick individuals (people like me) who hate their freedom. You could call that a coherent worldview, if it wasn’t so inhumanly insane. The hallmark of these fuckers is their refusal to compromise. Here is their glorious mission statement:
Americans committed to:
Defending our God-given rights
Protecting liberty
Upholding the Constitution
Promoting less government
Preserving America’s founding values
Something I learned from my personal life — there are people, dear loved ones sometimes, who, once in a conflict, reveal a rigidity and need to fight to the death that was unthinkable a moment earlier. Their unwillingness to compromise is actually an inability to compromise, based on a deep terror of loss of control. This type only feels safe when they are in charge and their will is not disputed. They refuse to negotiate because they can’t compromise, crippled by a fear as powerful as the terror of imminent, violent death. Feel sorry for these creatures if you are kind-hearted, but never underestimate the depths of their desperation when they are in a battle to the death (which they always are when compromise is needed).
Speaking of psychopaths, it struck me last night — Trump was deeply jealous of his buddy Jeffrey, a guy who started with nothing but an amazing ability to lie and manipulate and an insatiable appetite for young girls, and wound up as a super-wealthy friend and confidant of the most powerful people in the world. Epstein got away with raping 14 year-old girls for decades, and his powerful buddies — including lying gay anti-icon Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent [1] — all stayed close to him anyway, even after his criminal proclivities became public. Wealthy, powerful men like Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trump, all stayed friends with Epstein, seemingly whether blackmailed by him or not. No wonder the perverted fucker was suicided in federal detention under Trump and Bagpiper Bill Barr. How infuriating his successful, unaccountable scumbag life must have been to the eternally covetous Donald John Trump!
[1] In the event the administration becomes aware of this on finance.senate.gov and takes it down, as they are wont to do, here is the first part of the post:
Washington, D.C. – Following new revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s deep and long-running relationship with J.P Morgan, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act(PETRA)to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to turn over Epstein-related Treasury records to Senate investigators. Finance Committee staff reviewed a large portion of those files in person at the Treasury Department in 2024. Senator Wyden has sought to obtain the complete set for further investigation, but Bessent has repeatedly refused to produce them to the committee and downplayed their significance. The files detail Epstein transactions totaling at least $1.5 billion dollars, and they include the names of women and girls he may have trafficked, as well as the identities of individuals whose involvement with Epstein may put them at risk of blackmail or other foreign corruption. They also reveal potential violations of federal anti-money laundering laws by J.P. Morgan and other banks–compliance failures that helped Epstein continue abusing and trafficking women and girls many years after law enforcement was first alerted to his activities.
“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes, and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records, because it’s simply impossible that somebody with his background in finance is unaware of FinCEN or any of the other investigative offices within the Treasury,” Senator Wyden said. “From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”
The only language Nazis speak is power. The only way to defeat Nazis is through constant, organized, unbroken resistance. It is futile to argue with people who hold violently incoherent views and demand obedience or death. The impasse over funding of DHS is a great example of the futility of negotiating in good faith with a party that spits on good faith. This is a characteristic of any fascist movement. One slogan of the early Nazi supporters was “wir scheissen auf die frieheit!”, which the NY Times delicately mistranslated as “we spit on freedom” when the German verb actually means “shit”. We are a nation of laws, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage in fighting Nazis. As Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Josef Goebbels famously said:
The Framers of the Constitution, who “conservative” “constitutional scholars” like MAGA Mike Johnson claim to revere, amended the Constitution with explicit protections against government intrusion into personal freedoms. These first ten amendments are called The Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment [1] protects every person living in the USA from unreasonable searches and seizures. If the government wants to search your home, they must have a warrant signed by a judge who agreed there is probable cause of some illegal activity before that search is legal.
Nazis hate restraints like this on their power. They insist that the power they have justifies whatever they do, and if the doing gives them more power, so much the better. You cannot negotiate with Nazis. One reason is that their worldview is incoherent and inhuman. They can’t be persuaded by evidence, logic, appeals to ethics, conscience, common sense, common decency, fairness, justice, etc. Their mission is to unquestioningly serve the weltanshauung of their insane Leader. All authority in a Nazi system is top down, all power emanates from an infallible, superhuman Leader (Unitary Execuctive in American fascist lingo). Opposing the will of this all-powerful being is punishable by death in a Nazi state.
So true believer MAGA Mike Johnson refuses to yield, insisting DHS has the indisputable legal right to disobey the Constitution and a hundred years of Supreme Court precedent in performing its duties. Johnson insists DHS may make its own rules about arrest, detention, gassing and killing civilians in “self-defense”, and create their own “administrative warrants,” ignoring the Fourth Amendment, to round up dangerous brown children and their immigrant parents. 75,000 of these “worst of the worst” are already detained in over 200 American concentration camps.
There will be no compromise on this in the DHS funding debate, courts may not order the Leader to do anything that violates the Leader’s view of what must be done to preserve The Homeland (also borrowed from the German, Heimat [2], used by Nazis to define love of the Fatherland). MAGA “populists” work in coordination with our most powerful billionaire psychopaths and their hundred tentacled legal/public relations/voter suppression octopus. One particularly smelly tentacle is the “law firm” America First Legal, headed by nonlawyer Stephen Miller, the most adept and virulent of Mr. Trump’s inner circle of psychopathic asslickers. Miller’s absolute power flows directly from the Leader. Check out Miller’s mission statement for suckers who might kick in a few bucks they don’t have:
We protect America First values by holding every level of government accountable, strategically litigating against unconstitutional policies, and ensuring that power stays where it belongs — with the American people.
We are in a hard fight for our democracy, with worse days to come. Our elected leaders, many sponsored by, and beholden to, legally created “persons”, corporations, who are always psychopaths, are probably not up to the task of fighting for our experiment in self-rule. It is up to each of us to push them to stand firm in a battle where they have only the leverage we provide by organizing, protesting, speaking out. Call your senators.
[1] The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized source
[2] The word describes a state of belonging “the opposite of feeling alien,” and its definition is not limited to a geographical place Continued in Wikipedia
The psychopath is motivated only by self-interest. Incapable of empathy, due, in large part, to a genetic anomaly making them impervious to the effects of humanizing hormones like oxytocin [1], the psychopath is also immune from regret. When they acquire political power over others the results are always the same — ruthlessly inhuman rule by violence.
Under this rule transparently false government lies are tirelessly promoted as the final truth. What we can observe with our own eyes, they insist, are the actual lies, all witnesses liars. A psychopathic government has every right to send heavily armed, untrained, largely uneducated bigots into cities, under a clearly fake “national emergency”, to smash car windows, tear gas, bear spray and pepper spray civilians at will, for any reason or for no reason, throw flash bang grenades, break down doors in violation of the fourth amendment, arrest toddlers, throw old people on the ground, beat people, zip tie them, pin them to the ground, shoot them ten times in the back, or, in the case of someone they find particularly bitchy, in the face. These objectively cold-blooded murders will be called self-defense, because those carrying out the will of powerful psychopaths can never be wrong and fault must always be the full weight of the murdered or abused person. They can also send anyone to concentration camps 1,000 miles from where they were illegally detained, and ignore any court that intervenes on the side of law, because, of course they can.
This is clearly the federal government we have now. A psychopathic president recognizes no restraint, so if the highest court in the land rules that a criminally inclined national CEO may not be held criminally accountable if he can claim he was only doing his job, the result is predictable. Mr. Trump’s government is preparing for a federal pogrom in Springfield, Ohio in the coming days, to celebrate, Black History Month in the sardonic Nazi manner popular on right wing social media. The targets of this pogrom are people from Haiti who are currently working in Springfield under Temporary Protected Status because conditions in Haiti are so dangerous that the State Department advises Americans not to go there. It’s fine for violent, criminal, disease carrying sub-humans who eat family pets, according to our currently fully Nazified federal government. Happy Black History Month, bitches, from JD Vance, Stephen Miller and President Thank You For Your Attention to this Matter.
Timothy Snyder, historian and scholar of twentieth century genocide by European fascist governments, who grew up in Ohio, not far from Springfield, wrote a powerful piece about the planned pogrom. He describes the steps by which Nazi agitation, literally by an American Nazi group, an essential part of The Base (al Q’aeda in Arabic [2]) and deliberate lies by JD Vance laid the groundwork for this ethnic cleansing. It chilled me to my heart to read, as it will chill you. I urge you to read it, and to take action before the deployment of the worst of the worst to another American city to make real the fake American carnage that Trump debuted in his first State of the Union speech, a speech written by American Jewish Nazi psychopath Stephen Miller. Miller is Trump’s brain, a morally stunted brain boiling with hatred and seeking violent revenge on anyone who has ever opposed its will.
two from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
[1] “in humans it plays roles in behavior that include social bonding, love, reproduction, childbirth, and the period after childbirth” (Wikipedia)
[2] From the Arabic word al-qa’ida, literally, the basesource
There is a personality type, often called malignant narcissist (though the American Psychiatric Association doesn’t recognize it) or psychopath (the APA has no direct diagnostic criteria for this either), that cannot be wrong, always blames someone else and is obsessed with punishing defiance of their will. If one of these sick bastards gets power they immediately surround themselves with others of this type so everybody is on the same page. If these morally deformed creatures control the government you get a fascist regime based on the indisputable will of the infallible Leader. The leader’s command becomes law, as it was in The Third Reich, führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft — the Leader’s word has the force of law.
It’s hard to argue, using facts, that Mr. Trump does not aspire to all of the powers Mr. Hitler had. He expressed as much to his chief of staff, John Kelly, regarding the unquestioning loyalty of Hitler’s generals (presumably Trump doesn’t know about the ones who plotted, and almost succeeded, in killing him). One infamous Nazi technique, now a staple of Trump’s MAGA party, is the Big Lie. An audacious lie repeated endlessly for public saturation then becomes an article of faith for membership in the dictator’s government. Ask any Nazi who was responsible for World War II, every one will answer “the Jews”. The ability to lie brazenly and without conscience is a job requirement for anyone aspiring to work for a “strongman”.
THE BIG LIE
Adherence to a gigantic, unifying lie is a loyalty test for all party members. The Stolen Election of 2020 lie is the reason, in spite of the election fraud myth being completely debunked, a MAGA federal judge in Missouri recently issued a secret search warrant allowing the Trump FBI to raid Fulton County, Georgia and seize boxes of ballots from 2020, preserved years beyond their required retention date, through a bogus lawsuit Trump filed years ago. Fulton County voted for Biden by over 200,000 votes in a state the strongman lost by a measly 11,780. The ballots were recounted numerous times. Trump asked the Georgia Secretary of State in a recorded, widely discussed January 2, 2021 “perfect call” to “find” 11,781 votes for him, to overturn Biden’s Georgia victory. It was the Black citizens of Fulton County, a Democratic leaning county, who defeated the race baiting Mr. Trump, an intolerable, enraging insult to someone like him. The only alternative to a more than 7,000,000 vote loss in an election is to scream fraud and make all of your followers repeat the lie until they are angry enough to riot and attempt to murder elected officials.
To own the news cycle on the day three million Epstein files were released, Trump somehow got a warrant to arrest Don Lemon, reportedly under the KKK Act, (according to Harmeet Dhillon at DOJ)among other federal antidiscrimination laws, for interviewing protesters in a church where the pastor is a local ICE official. The DOJ was unable to secure a warrant from the chief federal judge in the jurisdiction, and later from the Appeals Court there. The warrant was denied twice in Minnesota for lack of evidence of unlawful conduct. Not a problem for a reflexive, vengeful, compulsive liar who can never be wrong. Details of how he got the warrant, or what it contains, are still not public, but this is a case he will 100% lose in court, if it even makes it to court. No problem. Lemon spent the night in jail after his arrest yesterday at 11 pm. Here’s Rupert Murdoch’s take on the fact of the matter: The agitators [protesting in Pastor/ICE director David Easterwood’s church –ed] were reportedly under the impression that the house of worship’s pastor, David Easterwood, is a member of the federal immigration enforcement agency — a notion that Lemon perpetuated in a post on the social network Bluesky.[1]
Recall how Trump oversaw an inept and murderous response to a pandemic by weaponizing his opposition to the leading scientific advice. He went on television day after day, saying insane things, telling people that testing is the problem because it makes numbers go up and it makes the thing look worse than it is. He talked about just taking some bleach or cleaning inside your body with some kind of light somehow. The doctors around him at these news conferences seemed frozen in shame and horror trying to keep their faces neutral. By the time he, RFK Jr. and the former longtime heroin addict’s brain worm announced that Tylenol causes autism, everyone was inured to his compulsive lying. The result of Trump’s endless Covid lying was the US having the largest per capita Covid-19 death toll in the world (though our billionaires also had the largest financial windfall, so there’s that). No big deal that the American president directly caused all those deaths, though the adherence of his faithful to his pandemic lies was instrumental in his future victories among them.
He caused the deaths of a few hundred thousand more Americans than necessary by weaponizing mask mandates as local government tyranny. This surely wasn’t his idea. Probably the brainchild of one of the genius psychopaths over at the Heritage Foundation or the Institute for Humane Studies. He convinced millions of people to believe that only a coward would put a mask on their face, and only a fucking fascist would force you to put a mask on. And so tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands (disproportionately his own supporters) died needlessly of an airborne disease whose spread can be slowed tremendously if everybody wears masks when they’re in public or in close contact with others. You make the belief in this “resistance to government tyranny” idea an article of faith and you have further radicalized your gullible base in their hatred of anything you can call government tyranny.
In 2020, after losing reelection by a wide margin, both in the popular vote and the Electoral College, of course Trump claimed the election was rigged against him. He fired and attacked everyone who said the election was honest, raged at anybody who verified the fact that the legal outcome of the election was the 7 million vote majority of his opponent. He railed against the judges who threw his frivolous lawsuits out of court citing his lack of any kind of evidence of fraud or irregularity. Since he is a psychopath and must prevail at all costs, he insisted on this “Stolen Election” lie, and continued to insist on it until it became an article of faith in his party. As an article of faith, it can’t be challenged by the facts or evidence. The election of 2020 was fraud, every single Republican senator and congressman in the United States, (who was up for reelection) was not allowed to concede that Joe Biden won the election. Every single one of them said, when asked directly, “well, Biden’s the president now” and no matter what follow up they were asked they had to keep pointing to this fig leaf of not lying as they perpetuated the lie in every public appearance.
Once you make a lie an article of faith anybody who wants power in your party must faithfully embrace, you attract only liars. You begin to select only psychopaths, fellow criminals and extremely weak people, desperate for power, approval and self-enrichment (and, in many cases, to avoid prison). They are as desperate for those things as the corrupt, compulsively lying Trump himself and they will do anything to get power and approval. They ignore the fact that everyone who came before them, the minute they were not useful to Trump, was ripe for defaming and even the lynching, as Trump called for, with a little mid-riot tweet stating of his Vice President “Mike Pence betrayed us, he wouldn’t do what needed to be done, what he promised us he would do. He is a liar. Go get him.”
Former CBP “Commander at large”, 5’4″ Gregory “serial perjurer” Bovino, somehow always finds CBP members even shorter than him to pose next to him in photos. What a man!
The website of St. Paul-based Cities Church lists David Easterwood as a pastor, and his personal information appears to match that of the David Easterwood identified in court filings as the acting director of the ICE St. Paul field office. Easterwood appeared alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis press conference last October. . .
. . . In a Jan. 5 court filing, Easterwood defended ICE’s tactics in Minnesota such as swapping license plates and spraying protesters with chemical irritants. He wrote that federal agents were experiencing increased threats and aggression and crowd control devices like flash-bang grenades were important to protect against violent attacks. He testified that he was unaware of agents “knowingly targeting or retaliating against peaceful protesters or legal observers with less lethal munitions and/or crowd control devices.”
“Agitators aren’t just targeting our officers. Now they’re targeting churches, too,” the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency stated. “They’re going from hotel to hotel, church to church, hunting for federal law enforcement who are risking their lives to protect Americans.”
For those who can heal from abusive treatment by those who were supposed to take care of us when we were helpless, or from dear lifelong friends or family members, the process can take a long time. Decades of programming were involved, making us believe that we were the problem, that only we could fix something that is by its nature unfixable. If someone is damaged enough to consistently abuse people they claim to love, there is nothing the improperly loved one can do about it. There are several distinct steps an adult can take to this healing. There is no timetable for this, I’m sorry to say, but it is encouraging to know that healing can 100% happen.
The first step is to understand the dynamic. You are forced to present a false, always conciliatory face to those who treat you unkindly, particularly right after they mistreat you. This is an iron law of abusers — they blame you for making them treat you harshly. Nobody has ever consistently abused another person without putting the entire blame on that other person. A person who acts abusively actually believes they are justified in acting that way. They are damaged beyond hope of changing, most of the time. It is hard to believe this of someone you love, but the first step for getting out of a sick relationship is seeing it for what it is. If the entire relationship rests on you being eternally conciliatory, always accepting the full blame for any conflict, you are not in a healthy relationship.
The second step, I think, is listening to your body. Your body often knows the deal before your conscious mind does. Your muscles tense, you feel exhausted, your lungs hurt, your digestion gets disrupted, your body will give you all the signs you need that something is very wrong. Cause and effect demonstrates that if all of these things happened right after a confrontation with someone who can never be wrong, you need to understand what your body is telling you. You may want to believe you can work things out with anyone, particularly a longtime loved one. Your body will tell you, without any ambiguity, that you can’t work things out with someone who angrily demands you recognize that they can never be wrong and that all anger is your fault alone.
The final step, once you understand you are dealing with an implacably angry person who can’t be wrong, is to truly stop caring what these abusers say or do. If you can’t have a reasonable conversation and work out any conflict with a loved one, you don’t have a relationship worth saving. This addition by subtraction is a wonderful gift to give yourself. Once you truly internalize the necessity of doing this you are prepared not to fall into the trap of the charming person who idealizes you in order to use you and mistreat you, whenever the occasion demands. It is a beautiful feeling to finally know there is nothing better you can do than avoid this type. And that you now have the tools to avoid these fuckers.
The cherry on top is when you realize you have no feelings about it afterwards, outside of relief. When you stop brooding over what you’ve allowed yourself to endure at the hands of a damaged person, when their name brings up little feeling, when you have no doubt that you’ve done the only sane thing, that feels very much like a deep wound has finally healed.
60 Minutes, the famous hour-long weekly CBS news digest, was set to air a piece about the brutal conditions in El Salvador’s infamous torture prison, CECOT. This is the prison Kilmar Abrego Garcia and about two hundred other men were illegally rendered to, under the direction of Trump’s repugnant henchmen, Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller and puppy killer Kristi Noem (she, in defiance of a federal court order).
Under our law a person must have a chance to defend himself against illegal detention (this right is called habeas corpus) before he can be sent to prison, particularly in another country, particularly one known for torturing its prisoners. 60 Minutes did a fairly harrowing piece on the prison, including several interviews with people sent to CECOT by Trump.
These men, all non-criminals, were illegally imprisoned, for a sadistic indefinite sentence and brutalized on video in the El Salvadoran dictators, notorious torture complex. The piece on CECOT passed all legal vetting and editorial standards meetings at CBS. It was scheduled to air last night. Bari Weiss killed the story. Robert Reich covers the horror of it beautifully here. This is the letter the segment’s producer wrote to her news team:
News Team,
Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.
I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.
Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.
We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.
If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient.
If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.
These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.
CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.
We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.
I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.
Sharyn
No good dictator will tolerate truthful reporting on their abuses — like the hundreds illegally rendered to CECOT torture prison in El Salvador last Spring. Here’s the story Bari Weiss killed, on behalf of the guy with the “alcoholic’s personality” (and the 1% on whose behalf he acts), the increasingly demented Orange Polyp, on behalf of billionaire Trump donors/media monopoly entrepreneurs Larry Ellison the elder and Ellison the younger.Ellison the younger is the basic Jared Kushner, though with less access to the president, so far.
The piece was actually on YouTube for a little over an hour today, before the billionaire son of a billionaire, Ellison the younger, made sure his legal team was striking this video (shot off a screen, aired in Canada, if I recall) for copyright violation.
This was put up earlier today by Senator Cory Booker. I saw it at 2 pm, I was about number 200,000. Early the next morning 1,100,000 people had seen it. Give it a like!
Medicare, the health care partnership between private insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and the government to protect the health of people over 65 (or with certain disabilities) is promoted as the solution to health care coverage for Americans of all ages. At 69, and dealing with Medicare now for a few years, I find this idea appalling, especially since the only solution to protecting the health of the old and the sick is a single payer system that cuts out all the parasitic middle men who profit off disease and our legitimate fear of death.
Citizens of a democracy deserve decent health care as a right of citizenship, like in every other wealthy economy (and formerly Iraq, Libya and other third world “shitholes”). But, lest I forget, America is exceptional.
Every year, between October 15 and December 7 (a day that always lives in infamy now, thanks to Medicare) purchasers of Medicare insurance are urged to shop on the marketplace and find the best suited plans for themselves. You can compare prices and, in some cases, actual coverage. It is no fun navigating the website, shopping for the best “deal” that should be provided to you automatically as a lifelong tax payer. Each of us should get the best deal available from our government, the one we fund, the one that is supposed to watch out for our best interests.
The economic reality is that, in a consumer society, if you need a few pills, you will pay 50 cents each. If you buy a billion pills, the price is 3 cents each. This is simple capitalism, economy of scale. The more you buy, the less each one will cost you [1]. Medicare buys a trillion pills a year, but is prevented, by a right wing/corporate law signed by Dubya, from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies based on that economy of scale leverage.
And so old people are forced to enter this kind of virtual mall, after October 15th of each year, where you can search for the best deals before the annual December 7th final deadline comes crashing down and you can choose nothing until the following October 15th rolls around because, fair is fair and rules are rules.
Part D of the alphabet soup that is Medicare is the prescription drug plan and every Medicare recipient must choose a Part D plan (or get it included in the problematic, loophole-ridden, insurance company sponsored Medicare plans known as Medicare Advantage). Prices for Part D vary wildly. In 2024 I chose the cheapest drug plan available, Aetna Silverscript, for $31 a month. Then:
You see profit margins here that would make Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk insanely jealous. Over 100% price increase in 2025 and then, a tic below another 100% price increase the following year. All perfectly legal here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, as long as you get a letter from that corporation informing you that your premiums will double and you will get only slightly less coverage.
A billionaire named Mark Cuban set up a company called CostPlus that will mail you prescription drugs, at 15% above cost plus handling and mailing. You can calculate the approximate cost on their website. The four generic prescription drugs I take will cost under $100 every three months, less than $400 for the year. No deductible, no insurance, just the prescriptions. I signed up online. There is a form for my doctor to submit to them, and the drugs will be shipped to me every ninety days.
I called Aetna to cancel my Part D with them, after visiting the marketplace and seeing annual prices, under our American “freedom of choice”, from $1,000 to $3,000 for the identical drugs (cost of drug copays plus premiums). My once modest $31/month plan was now up there with some of the most expensive. The woman I spoke to at Aetna was lovely, but she was not a trained disenrollment specialist, she explained, and so couldn’t take my cancellation order. She gave me another number to call to speak to a “Medicare disenrollment specialist”, and after checking, at my request, confirmed it is a 24/7 number.
In the wee hours of the morning I decided to make the last aggravating December 7th related call of the year and get that particular pile of steaming scats off my plate. When I called the 800 number it came up like so:
Who the fuck is Valley Organized Physicians? Fuck if I know, but they answer the phone “Medicare”. The person I spoke to patched me through to a disenrollment specialist named Kevin. Kevin and I wound up talking for almost an hour. He somehow had instant access to every prescription drug I’d bought in the last three years. His job, apparently, was to sell me a Part D plan, as I learned when he read me the complete list, suggesting that some, if not many, would be hard to get without insurance.
Kevin warned me that unless I enrolled in a Part D program with creditable coverage that met the minimum standards of Medicare, I’d be subject to a potentially large lifetime monthly fine that would add several dollars, or even a hundred or more, to my monthly premium in perpetuity should I need Part D coverage in the future.
I told Kevin I had no idea what “creditable” meant in that context and he explained. If the prescription drug program you enroll in is not recognized by Medicare, it’s not creditable and you will pay a monthly fine for the rest of your life if you cancel a creditable plan at any time during your years on Medicare. Way to watch out for the old and vulnerable, you fucking corporate psychopaths, I thought. But since Kevin was being so nice, we continued to amiably bat the ball back and forth.
Kevin laid out the worst case scenario to make me understand the risk I was taking by going with a non-creditable plan. Say in five years you decide you need Part D, for some expensive medication, let’s say (which, admittedly, Part D might not cover, but exceptions can sometimes be made for medical necessity). Well, currently the penalty is 39 cents a month times twelve (since you can only fix this once a year). That penalty number keeps going up. So in five years time, Kevin told me, I could be looking at a penalty of maybe $50 a month, maybe $100.
I pointed out that if I realized it was a mistake to opt for CostPlus and bought a Part D plan at the next available date (October 15, 2026) I’d pay $4 a month penalty for the rest of my life. Meantime, Aetna had increased their premium price for their basic plan 100% one year and 100% the following year. I asked him how it was possible that an insurance company can double its rate year after year with no regulation by Medicare.
Kevin had an answer worthy of a Republican congressman speaking to a FOX audience, there are many factors, market forces, which are impossible to regulate, or predict, or even consider, he told me. In other words it’s hard to say and above our pay grades to understand or do anything about. I told him it was not hard to say that costs for Aetna had not increased 200% in two years.
I expressed dismay that Medicare imposed no regulations on what private insurance companies could charge. He agreed that it was not unreasonable for me to be dismayed, but that there was a reason, somehow, beyond our feeble human understanding, apparently, that corporations can’t be regulated but consumers must be charged lifetime penalties for not buying creditable plans from approved insurance companies providing benefits consistent with the minimum standards of Medicare Part D.
Kevin told me to look for a zero cost Part D plan, then checked and said there were none available in my area. He tried to sell me a $35 a month plan, from Healthspring Assurance, which, with the drugs, would cost me only about $720 a year. He agreed there was no guarantee that Healthspring wouldn’t double its premium next year, but that’s why there is a period to compare prices once a year and the requirement of a letter informing the customer that the price was about to double.
He was trying to help me out, he said, after explaining he could have disenrolled me as soon as I called, but he was warning me of the potentially dire consequences of uncreditable disenrollment. I said that in dollars and cents, the difference between $300-400 a year for generic prescriptions, and even the bargain price of $720, would seem to more than offset the penalty for a year or two.
Eventually, after a long chat, he told me he would disenroll me. There was no confirmation number, no proof we’d ever had a conversation of almost an hour (except on my phone, but again, who the hell is Valley Organized Physicians?), I’d get a letter from Aetna confirming I’d been disenrolled, he told me. We bid each other a polite goodnight.
We got off the phone, it was now 4 a.m., and my head immediately fucking exploded. Every narcissist I’ve ever known has told me I’m too sensitive. Maybe the despicable freaks are right about that. I was unable to tune down my outrage enough to get to sleep, the pill I took at 5:00 allowed me to finally drift off around 6:30 a.m. for a few hours of sleep. I’m too sensitive, goddamn it, and it’s messing with my health.
Trump rage posted this in response to a viral short video in which elected veterans of the armed forces and intelligence services reminded serving members of their oath not to follow illegal orders.
The video was difficult to find on the YouTube search engine or any other search engine I tried. Fortunately I had it in my history from viewing it the other day:
In fairness to the NY Times, a paper that regularly publishes important investigative pieces and blurs crucial lines with equal frequency, it ran this article yesterday.
Here are a few recent favorites of mine from the front page of the journal of record for the United States of America, but first:
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