Category Archives: current events

Editors do not have the right to edit, only Trump does

Trump Files $10 Billion Suit Against BBC Over Documentary

The New York Times reports on another sickening MAGA attempt to intimidate media that reports unflatteringly on the historic ugliness of their dictatorial leader.

Trump, after shaking down ABC for $16,000,000 with a frivolous lawsuit over an on-air comment that Trump had been found civilly liable for rape (the judge in that case said as much, it is only an idiosyncrasy of New York State law, he explained, that differentiates “sexual assault” — no penis in vagina proved — and “rape”) and CBS for the same amount for doing what every TV station does — editing an interview, has also sued the NY Times and, the other day, the BBC.

The faltering, insanely litigious president ridiculously claimed, through his army of low rent Roy Cohns, that the BBC unfairly and viciously edited segments of his infamous January 6th speech to a crowd that stormed the Capitol moments later to make it falsely look like he had urged them to storm the Capitol.

Here are the highlights of his long harangue to the rioters on January 6th. You be the judge if there is a way to edit this incendiary speech where he is not telling the crowd he’s riled up for over an hour, with detailed lies about a “stolen election” he knew he had lost, to hit the Capitol, he promised he was going down there with them, “and we fight like hell or we won’t have a country anymore.”

You have to love the generally spineless NY Times’ last line in its report on this Hitlerian move on the part of Putin’s pliable puppet, Donald J. Trump, now suing the British Broadcasting Corporation, an outfit almost as despicable in his squinty eyes as our own Public Broadcasting Service. Here’s the Times, at its best:

The president also has a defamation lawsuit pending against The New York Times, which accuses the news organization of trying to undercut his 2024 candidacy and disparage his reputation. The Times says the lawsuit has no merit.

Trump kills

As a comedian, less so than as the president of the United States. He is a killer though, his psychopath father made sure of that. He has exhibited a taste for killing people, whenever he has the power to do so. He didn’t blink when told that the shuttering of USAID would kill 2,000 poor people a day, most of them little brown children, he probably made one of his famous wisecracks.

As his first term was ending Trump was enraged and anxious to execute federal death row prisoners after his loss in the “rigged election“. That his hyper religious Christian AG Bill Barr went into overdrive to support Trump’s killing rampage tells you all you need to know about far right Christianity. It was important for these angry, punitive men to kill these federal prisoners before Trump lost the unchallengeable power to do so. They rushed to kill several men of color and a woman, Lisa Montgomery [1], so crazy it’s hard to understand why she wasn’t locked in a mental institution for life.

Of course, once he was unfairly snubbed and deprived of the recent Nobel Peace Prize he so richly deserved, he began to refocus on an emergency war on drugs against the “narco-terrorist” government of Venezuela (as well as stepping up violent ICE  attacks on his own civilian population).  In addition to the documented torture of illegally detained non-criminals at his private detention centers, now holding close to 70,000 people in cruel conditions, he has killed at least 87 South Americans in strikes on small boats after accusing the crews of acts of war against the USA.

The rage to prevail has always animated our current president, the “Winner”, and killing is the ultimate assertion of an extreme notion of power, I suppose. Trump argues that he is free to kill anyone he designates a deadly enemy under IEEPA – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Oh, wait, that’s his fig leaf for his illegally imposed tariffs. He is allowed to murder suspected drug dealers anywhere, he claims, because of another emergency war power someone told him about, possibly the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798, plus he has “an Article II” and, most convincingly of all, the people he is killing — “narco-terrorists” — are totally evil.

Oddly enough, former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is in detention at the International Criminal Court at the Hague for the identical crime, executing suspected drug dealers without arresting, charging and trying them first.  Although Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the International Criminal Court in 2019, much of the wholesale murder he committed took place before that date and so he’s still under the court’s jurisdiction and locked up.

Last month, judges decided to keep Duterte in custody, finding that he was likely to refuse to return for trial and could use his freedom to intimidate witnesses.

According to court filings, Duterte instructed and authorized “violent acts including murder to be committed against alleged criminals, including alleged drug dealers and users.” The charges against him date from Nov. 1, 2011, when he was still mayor of the southern city of Davao, to March 16, 2019, when the country withdrew from the court. He was president from 2016-22.

Estimates of the death toll during Duterte’s presidential term vary. National police put the figure at more than 6,000, while human rights groups claim up to 30,000. Families of victims hailed Duterte’s arrest in March.

Of course, Donald Trump’s body count somehow doesn’t include the more than 600,000 who have died so far as a result of Trump’s largest campaign donor, failed humanoid Elon Musk, being tasked with shutting down USAID, with Donald’s, and Charles Koch’s and the Heritage Foundation’s, blessing.  That alarming number of innocent dead, the poorest people in the world and their children, is expected to reach a million very soon, and more than 14 million over the next few years.

What are you going to do? Not everybody in the world is a winner… “and if you’re a winner, you get to kill whoever you want, they let you do it. Ask the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, they’ll tell you, just like they did when they declared me the winner of Trump v. United States.”

[1]

The Department of Justice has scheduled three federal executions during the administration’s lame-duck period: Orlando Hall on November 19, Lisa Montgomery on December 8, and Brandon Bernard on December 10. The last time the U.S. government carried out an execution between a presidential election and the inauguration of the new president for a federal crime was nearly 132 years ago, on January 25, 1889, when the outgoing administration of Grover Cleveland executed Richard Smith, a Choctaw Indian, for a murder on tribal land in Arkansas. source

Montgomery was the 11th prisoner to be killed by lethal injection since Donald Trump resumed federal executions last July after a 17-year hiatus. The president is an ardent supporter of capital punishment. source

Of course he is.

Handmaidens of fascism — Grey Lady edition

For American Nazism to take root in the United States, the hateful message Nazis must spread needs to come from everywhere, particularly from trusted, mainstream news sources. The New York Times has long been regarded as a trustworthy source of even handed news and opinion. Even as Trump rails against the Grey Lady and her fake news, she always curtsies respectfully, except when writing hard-hitting exposes, like the long one about his psychopathic father’s decades-long illegal tax avoidance scheme. This was the plan that paid Donald $200,000 a year, tax-free, from the time he was two years-old (and the president of a fictious tax avoidance corporation). What we read in the Times carries a certain amount of weight. It is alarming how often we find the call for fascism coming from inside the house, in a variety of insidious ways.

I really don’t understand what the journal of record gains from printing their brand of political reporting/editorializing. The following is from their chief political analyst (accent on the anal), Nate Cohn. The Times published this on October 9, 2025, during Trump’s government shutdown, before Schumer orchestrated the shameful Democratic capitulation that ended it. Cohn’s political orientation, or larger vision for the future of American democracy, is anybody’s guess (though it’s not a hard one). Like I say, these fuckers are handmaidens of fascism, which can’t succeed without unified support from super-influential mainstream straight shooters like Nate Cohn of the New York Times. FOX news or the NY Times? You be the judge (and jury).

. . .Health care hasn’t been front and center for years. In the final New York Times/Siena poll of the 2024 campaign, less than 1 percent of voters said health care was the most important issue to their vote. To the extent there’s a political battle over health care today, it’s mostly because Democrats forced a government shutdown over it.

That’s not to say there haven’t been major developments in health policy. The Republicans’ spending bill this summer derived most of its savings through health care cuts. And an expiration of Obamacare subsidies will affect millions of people. . .

. . . Not even this government shutdown is really about health care. The Democratic Party’s activist base demanded a shutdown because it wanted Democrats to do something to oppose Mr. Trump, not because of particular concerns about expiring health care subsidies. Only 1 percent of Democrats said health care was the most important issue facing the country in last week’s Times/Siena poll. This shutdown is “about” health care only because congressional Democrats redirected the energies of the party’s base onto an issue they deemed electorally fruitful.

According to the top political analyst for the NY Times, there’s a battle over health insurance not because health and death prevention are important to us all, not because the MAGA-headed GOP slashed $1,500,000,000,000 from health insurance programs and tax subsidies for healthcare to give that money to our greatest billionaires.  Not at all, it’s because “activist” Democrats forced a government shutdown over it… 

The paltry 1% concerned about health care were probably distracted by issues like a criminally insane president deploying an American gestapo in US cities and the Supreme Court’s shredding of our Constitution.   Ask directly about opposition to slashing health insurance and subsidies, closing rural hospitals, mandating tens of thousands of annual preventable deaths for lack of health insurance, and I think that 1% number goes up well over 70%, probably 100% of people of average intelligence.

This year’s Medicaid cuts were mostly obtained through the politically palatable means of adding work requirements; Democrats have not focused on trying to roll back those cuts during this shutdown fight. . .

[The “politically palatable means”, you fucking fuck?]

. . . For a long time, Democrats succeeded politically by promising to protect postwar prosperity against conservatives who would roll back Medicare and Social Security, or against unfair trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. With Mr. Trump promising to protect entitlements and campaigning against free trade, this winning Democratic playbook is gone.

A compulsively lying, obsessively vengeful, criminally insane kleptocrat, with advancing dementia, promising to protect what Democrats value — I guess that’s check and mate, Nate.

I hope I wind up in the same cattle car as this deluded fuck, give Nat a piece of what’s left of my mind on the way to Camp Trump… 

2% of humans are psychopaths, corporations close to 100%

I wonder how high that percentage goes among human billionaires. The current examples we know suggest a high correlation of the major traits of psychopaths with the best of the best and most deserving of the deserving — ruthless focus on self-interest, manipulativeness, exploitativeness, zero empathy, no capacity for remorse.

It is beyond question that the alter egos of billionaires, the immortal American/global “persons” known as corporations, are almost 100% psychopathic. Here’s the list of their traits from the excellent documentary The Corporation. (watch it for free on YouTube, highly recommended)

Picture any member of Trump’s billionaire cabinet, or the fabulous CEOs who line up to kiss their asses —  Jeff “rent Venice for my next wedding” Bezos, Elon “virtually human, kill millions of brown children” Musk, Mark “go to the mat — and fuck democracy–  for my  right to be richest man in the world” Zuckerberg, etc.   Now, imagine them embodied in an entity of eternal life, the vampire that is the modern corporation.  This “person” owes allegiance to nothing but pathological greed and the compulsion to maximize and hoard profit.  

Starting in 1971, when a group of worried very wealthy psychopaths hired tobacco lobbyist Lewis Powell (soon thereafter placed on the Supreme Court by Nixon) to draft a game plan for ensuring their eternal dominion over puny human persons, we can draw a straight line to Project 2025, featuring corporatist John Roberts and his morally deformed reactionary five on the Supreme Court.   Here’s the most condensed version I’ve seen of that story:

You don’t have to be a psychopath, of course, to raise prices by 100% two years in a row. You only need to be shamelessly greedy and able to do it. If you are a corporation, any amount of money you need to spend to make laws that allow you to double your prices every year is money well-spent. A cost of doing business! And psychopath is such a judgmental word!! How about just “successful” and stop with the judgement. Like the NY Times does:

 

An illegally appointed US attorney illegally “continuing as US Attorney” becomes not a matter of law — her appointment was ruled constitutionally invalid by a federal judge — but the object of criticism from judges who are “critical” of an illegally appointed DOJ official being kept in office after the federal court ruled the appointment illegal.

You see what the New York Times is doing here?  Innocently sanitizing a fascistic disregard for American law and a good old fashioned ass-wipe with the Constitution. Why not? All the points of view that are fit to print.

Bravo, Grey Lady, another bullseye.

Robert Caro, whose lifelong interest as a writer and researcher is understanding power, how it is acquired and how it’s used, wrote that to see what someone will do with power, study what they did as they climbed to power. These Project 2025 fascists were once the “lunatic fringe” John Birch Society, rabid anti-Communist segregationists who made no attempt to hide the foam on their lips. Today, after a long, relentless, fantastically expensive climb to power, they control all three branches of our government. The “Trump White House” released a document, the 2025 National Security Strategy, traditionally used to announce US foreign policy, that says a forthright fuck you to the rest of the world and shits on anything but the business interests of America’s wealthiest. Read all about it, from Heather Cox Richardson.

Department of War Crimes

One more chapter in the Age of Incoherence. There is apparently controversy about the legality of the US military killing civilians of foreign countries who are on boats, or survivors clinging to the wreckage of boats blown out of the water by the Trump Department of War [sic]. Six former service members, now in Congress, made a video reminding active service military and intelligence personnel of their duty to disobey unlawful orders. They were immediately threatened by Mr. Trump, who has never been more sane or measured — prosecution for sedition and execution!

Maximum lethality, baby. We are the department of death, destruction and faithful devotion to our savior, Jesus of Nazareth.

First of all, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, ordering the killing of survivors of an illegal drone attack in international waters, ordering an admiral to “kill them all”, is presumed to be a totally legal order, entitled to the strong presumption of legality, if done by the Department of War. The real problem Secretary of War [sic] Pete Hegseth faces is the stream of seditious leakers who make these legal orders public. These traitorous leakers will be found by the most transparent administration in history, and they will be secretly tried and executed for treason, presumably.

Secretary Hegseth posted a reminder to troops that orders from superiors are presumed legal and disobeying orders presumed legal is a crime punishable by court martial and what Senator Mark Kelly is facing from the newly lethal Department of War. I couldn’t find that post anywhere, though it appeared in a news feed on my phone this morning. I was too slow to do a screen shot…

There’s also the small matter of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

U.S. service members take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In addition, under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, service members must obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful orders. Unlawful orders are those that clearly violate the U.S. Constitution, international human rights standards or the Geneva Conventions.

Service members who follow an illegal order can be held liable and court-martialed or subject to prosecution by international tribunals. Following orders from a superior is no defense.  source

This will have to stand in for the latest example of Secretary Pete’s wise, sober and inspiring leadership via X, a repost from the man who made him Secretary of WAR [1]. But first, here’s what Mr. Trump himself posted about the military taking an oath to the Constitution and not a dictator on day one.

[1]

The eternal horror of things like the so-called Epstein files

I woke up thinking how the longtime operation of Jeffrey Epstein and his wing-woman Ghislaine Maxwell (including Epstein’s convenient death in federal detention during Trump 1.0) is the perfect illustration of how the powerful always prey, unaccountably, on the vulnerable. The privileged elites, rightfully hated by virtually everyone else, live by a different set of laws, rules and morality than the rest of us. They have always felt truly feel entitled to own everything and to make every decision for everybody else.

The rest of us are fungible, expendable pawns to be used to their best advantage. Their logic is impeccable, if self-serving. If 60,000 more poor people die preventable deaths, or 600,000 (estimated deaths so far from Musk canceling USAID) a million, or a hundred million, as the direct result of policies that ensure that the wealthiest can hoard even more wealth, how is that the fault of the super-wealthy? It’s simply democracy.

These rich powerful men saw the needy, cute 14 and 15 year-old girls Epstein and Maxwell collected from broken homes in working class neighborhoods as disposable receptacles for their desires. Most kids that age are insecure and easily seduced by praise and promises. Epstein literally groomed them, using his ultra sophisticated and charming procuress Ghislaine Maxwell to gain their trust. Epstein and Maxwell showered attention, praise, money, expensive gifts and the promise of a bright future on susceptible girls. They carefully screened the girls so they could be freely exploited without any fear of anything ever happening to Epstein and other the powerful men who used them. The girls were just objects of lust for them.

To the girls, the attraction was being made to feel special and the promise of money and class like the elegant Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was a spoiled, entitled, self-hating, pathetic, deeply damaged exploiter who was drawn to Epstein because he was like her beloved father, the ultimate scumbag billionaire who ripped off the pension funds of his own workers because he somehow wasn’t rich enough. Never having really had her shady, preoccupied father’s love (he left her nothing in his will) and in desperate need of wealth, she found another rich monster to cling to and became an abuser herself in order to feel some kind of power and self-worth.

The wealthy, well-connected men who sexually used these girls probably got off as much on the fact that the girls were garbage they could do whatever they want to as any other aspect of it. They were powerful and untouchable and these girls were cute, safe and ready for use, otherwise disposable instruments for the gratification of the mens’ undeniable desires. 

A highly respectable older man I once knew, who was likely a pedophile, asked me once why pedophiles were so hated, why they were so often killed by rapists and murderers when they got to prison. I stated the obvious — it’s probably because they prey on the most vulnerable and defenseless among us and the harm they do to their innocent young victims scars them for the rest of their lives. Even a psychopathic serial killer with a life sentence can probably grasp the evil of this on some level. If anyone deserves a harsh, violent end it’s someone who takes advantage of a trusting young person, and inflicts lifelong damage, for their own twisted gratification.

Of course, because of the wealth and power of the men Epstein secretly videotaped having sex with girls, the essential ugliness of the issue becomes obscured. It turns into an abstraction, a 1,000,000 page file to be haggled over by politicians, like the JFK assassination files. 62 years later, the true story of how JFK was killed, and who arranged his murder, is still shrouded in officially sanctioned bullshit. Anyone who questions the highly unlikely official lone gunman version is called a conspiracy theorist, though the real conspiracy appears to involve the obfuscation of what actually happened in Dallas and which powerful, unaccountable men arranged it.

A group of survivors of Epstein’s empire of lifelong trauma has shown great courage and resolve and they deserve a measure of justice for the abuse they were forced to endure. Their suffering is the heart of the Epstein files, whatever the rich fucks who scramble to protect themselves from shameful revelations about themselves may have to say about it. And, of course, it’s not as if Trump, Epstein’s lustful running buddy for decades, is mentioned in the files thousands of times, more than any other powerful man associated with the late pervert. Why would he be? There was no reason for the FBI to reassign 1,000 agents to spend thousands of hours scrubbing his name from files that are a complete hoax and don’t actually contain anything incriminating about anyone, was there?

And besides, while Trump pardons, the day after two ceremonial turkeys, a felonious former president of Honduras, imprisoned for importing tons of cocaine into the US, he is illegally killing men on boats (86 to date, that we know of) he accuses, with all evidence of their theoretical crime at the bottom of the ocean, of being terrorists bringing deadly drugs into the USA.

Welcome again to the Age of Incoherence. This is what happens when billionaires promote a power-crazed, vain, incurious, grandiose, crazy, manipulable, infinitely covetous idiot to power and age and genetics add dementia to the mix. What could go wrong?

Pam Bondi on the guilt of all Trump enemies, real or imagined

During a press conference after the dismissal of the cases against James Comey and Leticia James, AG Pam Bondi, who makes Bill Barr look like a straight shooter, was asked:

If I could just get your reaction to the James Comey and Leticia James cases being dropped today back in Washington.   James Comey put out a video, he said this matters most because a message has to be sent — the president of the United States could not use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies.  Your reaction to the cases being dropped and to that specific investigation.

“Sure, we’ll be taking all available legal actions including an immediate appeal to hold Leticia James and James Comey accountable for their unlawful conduct. I’m going to keep going on this, I’m not worried about someone who has been charged with a very serious crime. His alleged actions were a betrayal of public trust.”

Betrayal of public trust? 

The sitting attorney general, for the time being, anyway, stating “held accountable for their unlawful conduct” of two people hated by Trump who she was instructed to prosecute whether or not there was a likelihood of conviction in either case. She’s not worried about the feelings of someone she’s charged with a “very serious crime”.  She’s not worried about the fact the attorneys who work for her already wrote memos about all the good reasons to decline prosecution of these two. She’s not worried that her boss was credibly charged with very, very, very serious crimes he clearly committed, which would have been proved at trial with a mountain of evidence.  His crimes were especially heinous, like his ongoing mass murder of people on boats,  compared to the contrived “very serious crimes” that these two were vindictively charged with, at Trump’s command. Compared to Tom Homan taking a $50,000 cash bribe on videotape from the FBI? Commie talking point.

The presumption of innocence?  Not for people Trump tells me are evil! 

No wonder the Qataris used to pay Pamela Jo Bondi $115,000 a month for her lobbying and legal expertise…