Very Stable Genius at work

Never the sharpest knife in the drawer, not his psychotic father’s first pick for heir to the Trump Empire, a lifelong bully, abuser, sexual predator, compulsive liar and childishly aggrieved control freak, he is also now, increasingly, showing signs of dementia. His father also was demented by the time he was DJT’s age. He was not, however, demented enough to let his idiot middle son take over his affairs when Donald tried to make himself master of his father’s fortune while the old man was still alive. To the demented Frederick Christ Trump’s credit, he surrounded himself with lawyers when Donald arrived to get his father to sign over control of his fortune. Of course, as soon as the old man died, Donald defied his father’s written wishes and dissolved the Trump empire at a 40% discount to the buyer, something only the most stable genius would ever dream of doing.

Jimmy Kimmel nailed it the other night. He played a typical incoherent Trump “response” to a question. He looked at the audience for a moment and said “what is he even talking about?” The only proper follow up from any reporter talking to Trump, he said, is “Mr. President, what are you talking about?” ICE agent shoots woman in the face three times because he was stressed at being dragged by a car six months earlier, after he broke the window and tased the driver (the driver is now awaiting sentencing, mind you). “She was the worst of the worst, she ran him over with her car, tried to kill him, she’s a domestic terrorist, still at large, my ratings are still the best of anybody all time, everyone is saying,” says the dotard-in-chief.

Here’s a bit of Heather Cox Richardson’s letter from last night. She begins by noting that all this shitting on the Oval Office desk and have his underlings eat it on camera (my image, not her’s, she speaks of Venezuela, Greenland, ICE murder) has succeeded in one thing — knocking the Epstein files and DOJ’s deliberate contempt of law off the front pages.

. . . This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “if the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you [sic] attention to this matter! President DJT.”. . .

. . . The images coming out of Minnesota have been compared to those of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordering police officers and firefighters to use fire hoses against the children marching during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, or of law enforcement officers beating civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. A family with six children in a van caught in the clash last night were hit with tear gas and air bags detonated by a flash-bang grenade. Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment. “My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent. This shouldn’t have happened,” the mother told Kilat Fitzgerald of Fox9 in Minneapolis. “We were just trying to go home.” . . .

. . . One of the other things Trump’s statements have driven out of the news is the revelation from yesterday that the U.S. has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil and is keeping the money in Qatar rather than in U.S. banks. Trump claims that he has the power to manage that money, and is trying to prevent its capture by the oil companies that have prior claims against Venezuela for property seized when it nationalized the oil fields. . .

. . . The strain also showed in Trump’s fury on Tuesday when a worker at a Ford plant Trump was touring as an attempt to appeal to his weakening base shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Rather than simply ignoring the heckler, as politicians usually do, Trump gave him the middle finger and said, “F*ck you. F*ck you.”

source

The NY Times published a definitive debunking of the Trump lie parroted by ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, her soul-dead assistant “secretary for public affairs” Tricia McLaughlin, JD Vance and other lackies, that murdered Minnesota woman Renee Good deserved to be summarily killed because she’s a murderer. Hats off to the NY Times. They suck in major, critical ways, and have often been handmaidens of American fascism (click the Grey Lady link at the side here for examples), but they also publish very important, authoritative investigative pieces. This is one of them. Check out this video by clicking on the image:

Third Reich stuff

If you want motive for the cold-blooded killing of a woman with a breezy attitude by an ICE agent with a violent attitude, listen to the last couple of seconds of this video. You can hear Jonathan Ross, or one of his fellow ICE agents, say “fucking bitch” after the third shot to her face, as the dead woman’s car lurches forward 100 ft to crash, kind of says it all.

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left, who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe, against our law enforcement officers.

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job. The idea that Tim Walz and a bunch of radicals in Minneapolis are going to go after and make this guy’s life miserable because he was doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous. source

From the White House podium Thursday, Vice President JD Vance characterized the victim of the shooting — a 37-year-old mother of three identified as Renee Nicole Good — as a member of “a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”

“This is classic terrorism,” Vance said. “We’re not going to give into terrorism on this.”

Wednesday afternoon, Trump went on the attack.

“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense,” he wrote on Truth Social. 

Trump said it was “hard to believe” the ICE officer was alive — despite video showing he remained on his feet throughout the incident and was filmed walking around after the shooting.

source

Back to the soulless JD Vance: 

“The gaslighting is off the charts and I’m having none of it. This guy was doing his job. She tried to stop him from doing his job. When he approached her car, she tried to hit him.

A tragedy? Absolutely. But a tragedy that falls on this woman and all of the radicals who teach people that immigration is the one type of law that rioters are allowed to interfere with.”

Today, in a press conference on the shooting, Vice President J.D. Vance made even more extreme statements, claiming—all evidence to the contrary—that the woman shot in Minneapolis was part of a “left wing network” and that “nobody debates” that she “aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator.” In fact, among those who “debate” Vance’s version of events are the journalists at the New York Times, who today published a slow-motion analysis that demonstrated conclusively that the vehicle was turning away from the officer when he opened fire. source

I salute the Grey Lady for posting this video report of the shooting

Or as Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post spun the shooting of Renee Good, when enraged ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot her three times in the face, as … you be the judge.

Epstein Eve in the Grey Lady

“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Wow. Check out what the NY Times published on the eve of the deadline for the DOJ [partially, conditionally, grudgingly] complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, unanimously passed by Congress (but for one diehard MAGA representative) and signed into law, thirty days ago, by Trump himself:

The article (which Trump surely regards as a treasonous, false, witch hunt hit job) begins:

Jeffrey Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” He and Donald J. Trump also had “no formal relationship.” They went to a lot of the same parties. But they “did not socialize together.” They were never really friends, just business acquaintances. Or “there was no relationship” at all. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”

For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Trump and his representatives have offered shifting, often contradictory accounts of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, one sporadically captured by society photographers and in news clips before they fell out sometime in the mid-2000s. Closely scrutinized since Mr. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell during Mr. Trump’s first term, their friendship — and questions about what the president knew of Mr. Epstein’s abuses — now threatens to consume his second one.

The controversy has shaken Mr. Trump’s iron hold on his base like no other. Loyal supporters have demanded to know why the administration has not moved more quickly to unearth the convicted sex offender’s remaining secrets. In November, after resisting months of pressure to release more Epstein-related documents held by the federal government — and facing an almost unheard-of revolt among Republican lawmakers — Mr. Trump reversed himself, signing legislation that requires their release beginning this week.

Mr. Epstein had a talent for acquiring powerful friends, some of whom have become ensnared in the continuing scrutiny of his crimes. For months, Mr. Trump has labored furiously to shift himself out of the frame, dismissing questions about his relationship with Mr. Epstein as a “Democrat hoax” and imploring his supporters to ignore the matter entirely. An examination of their history by The New York Times has found no evidence implicating Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of minors.

But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.

Read all about it

In response to a detailed list of questions from The Times, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement: “This fake news story, which is not worth the paper it’s printed on, is just another stale regurgitation of decades-old false allegations against President Trump. The truth will remain the same no matter how many times The New York Times tries to change it. President Trump did nothing wrong, and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a creep.”

And one last bite (from the article), with the classic Trump assessment of a guy he now claims to have hardly known:

In the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein — now extraordinarily wealthy and well connected — seemed to grow less content with the anonymity he had carefully drawn around his life and business. In 2002, practically inviting public scrutiny, he arranged to fly with former President Bill Clinton and a celebrity entourage on a humanitarian trip to Africa. Details of the trip were soon shared with The New York Post’s Page Six. Not long after, New York magazine published the first major profile of Mr. Epstein. Mr. Trump provided the headline quote: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

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.

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.

[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.

Quickly forgotten atrocity by the deadly dotard in chief

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:

You go, girl.

Gray Lady puffing up a grifting pinhead

The Grey Lady:

Trained in the bare-knuckle arts of New York City real estate, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff think of themselves as deal guys working for the ultimate deal guy. Their approach is simple: Get to a yes first, and hash out the details later. The two have spent a lot of time together over the past few weeks, crisscrossing Miami, then the country, and now the world, in pursuit of peace. The rebuilding of Gaza is also in their sights.

“The experience that Steve and I have as deal guys is that you have to understand people,” Mr. Kushner said. “You have to be able to kind of get the bottom line out of them, and then see who do you think is playing games, and how much room do you have to push things?”

He added: “A lot of the people who do this are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats. It’s just different being deal guys — just a different sport.”

I have no idea why the New York Times is suddenly blowing this corrupt nepo-baby clown, and it’s frankly a bit sickening, but watch the fabulously rich boy genius’s brilliant bit of whining as he snippily answers questions about the last time he and his genius Nobel Prize recipient father-in-law made permanent peace in the Middle East, in spite of facing, according to the seasoned, streetwise “getting to yes” diplomat/deal maker, the recalcitrance of angry, self-pitying, deluded Palestinians perennially too stupid to act in their own best interests (compare — MAGA voters), presumably why they did not participate in the negotiations.

Here’s one of America’s greatest arrogant super-wealthy mediocrities (no offense to the mediocre intended) humbly bragging about having made lasting peace in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords. The first few minutes of this asshole’s responses are priceless, made hilarious by the chyrons that contradict his every talking point.

Why the New York Times took this opportunity, with everything else going on at the moment (including the scandal of peace-loving DJT not winning the Nobel Peace Prize!), to daintily fellate pardoned felon/Ambassador to France Charles Kushner’s well-born son Jared, you’d have to ask the editorial putz who approved the article. Could it have been a friend of Bari Weiss, new $150,000,000 CBS editor-in-chief?