Category Archives: current events

This is why wealthy fascists paid Bari $150,000,000 to run a former flagship news service

“Anti-woke” influencer Bari Weiss was chosen to run CBS news by billionaire Trump donors/CBS buyers Ellison, father and son, because they like the cut of her jib. She can look woke cucks in the face and own them. The Ellisons paid her $150,000,000 for her blog when they hired her as Editor-in-Chief of CBS. Here’s an email Weiss wrote to CBS news staff after killing the story of hundreds of humans rendered, without any legal process at all, to an El Salvadorian torture prison for indefinite detention and abuse.

Our mission?   Media monopoly, owned by oligarchs, promoting curated “news” supportive of the regime’s policy goals to implement permanent one party, totalitarian rule?   Hmmm, I guess that tracks.  It may indeed seem radical, on a slow news week when nothing of great national consequence is happening, to kill a carefully vetted story damaging to the fulfillment of their mission.   

Slow news week.   The DOJ violating a law the president signed, withholding 99% of files in a brazen, lawless attempt to protect an actual cabal of powerful, untouchable pedophiles, likely also including their boss, an adjudicated rapist  — slow news.  The chaotic serial dumps of thousands of compromising documents relating to notorious pedophile, teenaged girl trafficker and blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein, including numerous mentions of his fellow “playboy” the president, and the sudden “discovery” of a million new files … a very, very slow news week, you dig.  

At least Rupert “Fair and Balanced” Murdoch’s FOX news can straighten this CBS kerfuffle out. CBS may have indeed have had a reasonable, even if dubious, or possibly spurious, rationale for killing the story:

Psychopaths will be psychopaths

Yawn, very slow news week.  Merry Christmas to those who celebrate.

The cover-up is shameless, the crimes, much worse

Those who exploit underage children for sexual gratification are probably the most universally despised group of men in the world.  I’ll leave the reporting of Trump defying a law he himself urged Congress to vote for, and signed with his customary Sharpie, to the brilliant Heather Cox Richardson who gives a complete account of the scope of the Trump DOJ’s brazen crime.    Here’s Trump criminal attorney, now number two in the DOJ (and smells like it, too) Todd Blanche, incoherently channeling his inner Roy Cohn. “The absurdity of us pulling down a single photo because Trump is in it is laughable.” Well-said, asshole, no argument here:

Heather gives every detail you need to know about the dick-fingered coverup of Donald’s bestie Jeffery Epstein’s pedophilia club for rich white men.  One thing she didn’t mention is that the Department of Justice [sic] has 300 GB of Epstein files in their possession and has released a hefty 3 GB, on the very last day to “comply”.  

American media treats this, in virtually every account, as the release of a fraction of the records, but, let’s be fucking clear, that “fraction” is 1/100th. Coincidentally 1%, just like the wealthy, powerful child rapists being protected by our criminally inclined DOJ. Heather continues:

Officials in the Trump administration have been treating members of Congress with contempt since Trump took office, deliberately flouting the 1974 Impoundment Act that prohibits presidents from unilaterally deciding to withhold funds Congress has appropriated, for example, and ignoring the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional approval for military actioyns that last more than 60 days.

What Heather doesn’t go into in this piece is that Trump, illegally creating an “agency” to let Musk slash agencies that were investigating the businesses of the richest man on earth, not only violated the 1974 Impoundment Act, it also resulted, directly, in the deaths, so far, of at least half a million poor people, many of them children. It’s hard to get the numbers, and nobody’s paying much attention to them in the media, with the Orange Polyp performing his stinking shit show around the clock, but the footnote gives you some idea of the scope of the mass deaths from his violation of the Impoundment Act and his recission of the budget that was allocated to prevent these deaths. [1] Here’s the skinny from an extremely dry, bureaucratic account of this mass death:

Relative to FY2024, declining obligations to global health implies the potential for 1.1 million lives lost per year if these trends continue.

Similarly, the 1973 War Powers Act which requires a president intent on waging war with the US military to get consent from Congress, once the unauthorized killing and military escalations have gone on for more than 60 days. All of those estimated 100 men killed in the Caribbean, their boats blown to shit because “narco-terrorists” equal “enemy combatants” and, according to a lawless regime, may be killed without evidence or any coherent rationale, were murdered in acts of state-sponsored piracy on the high seas.

[1]

For humanitarian and food aid [alone], the decline suggests the potential for [an additional] 490,000 lives lost per year, bringing the total lives at risk from aid cuts to 1.6 million lives lost per year if obligations do not revive. Compared to FY2023, this falls to around 670,000 [additional] lives lost per year.

source

CECOT? There’s no such thing as El Salvador’s infamous torture prison, says Bari Weiss, anti-woke news czar of CBS

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. 

For the moment, at least, you can see the entire segment here

USA! USA!!!!

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!

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.