As the Year 2025 Ends

The thing about New Year's Eve is that it allows you to say farewell to the previous year - 2025 - while greeting the incoming year - 2026 - with a certain level of cheer and optimism. 

So the best I can say about 2025 - all of the damage and disaster and human rights violations and destruction of national norms (and buildings) - is "What that trip really necessary?"

And the best I can say about going into 2026 is "Are we all ready to fight our way out of the bullshit storm trump and his lackeys are about to overwhelm us with, as they escalate their war on everyone who's not Rich, White, and Male?" 

I don't have much optimism or cheer this evening. I do have resolve and a willingness to stand up for myself and others when the Far Right thugs are going to come for everything - our freedoms, our communities, our love of people - that makes us true Americans.

Come at us, 2026. We're not going anywhere without a fight.

Reading Between the Redacted Lines

Update: Many thanks to tengrain for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. A joyous Io Saturnalia to all and a safe Christmas and... and... is trump threatening Greenland again???

This weekend was meant to be a revelation about the scale and horror of the crimes Jeffrey Epstein committed as a sex trafficker of teen girls to the rich elites. Instead this weekend revealed just how inept and desperate trump and his lackeys are in trying to hide the depth of his involvement (via CK Smith at Salon): 

The initial chunk, made public Friday, includes thousands of pages of documents and photographs related to Epstein’s sex trafficking case. But large portions are heavily redacted, and officials have acknowledged that additional material is still under review, drawing criticism from lawmakers and victims’ advocates who say the disclosures fall short of promised transparency.

According to public records and investigative reporting over the years, complaints and law-enforcement awareness of Epstein’s conduct date to at least 1996, years before his first high-profile arrest in Florida in 2006. Advocates argue the newly released files underscore that Epstein was not operating unnoticed, raising fresh questions about why early warnings failed to trigger sustained investigations.

The Justice Department said redactions are necessary to protect victims’ identities and avoid releasing unverified or sensitive information. But critics contend that the scope of the blacked-out material makes it difficult to assess how authorities handled the case across multiple jurisdictions and decades.

The document dump arrives amid bipartisan pressure on the department to provide fuller disclosure and explain gaps in enforcement that allowed Epstein to maintain wealth, influence and access to young women for years. Lawmakers have also questioned whether the staggered release risks obscuring institutional responsibility rather than clarifying it...

Sarah Fitzpatrick over at the Atlantic makes the observation how these redactions are an injustice to the many women who were victimized over the decades:

Just over 24 hours earlier, on the eve of the deadline for the files’ release, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had placed a call to a group that supports survivors of Epstein’s abuse, according to multiple people briefed on the outreach. On the call, the officials previewed what would and wouldn’t be in the disclosure: photographs, yes; videos, no. Victims’ names would be redacted. At one point, according to a person familiar with the conversation, the officials suggested that if video exists, it may still be in the possession of the Epstein estate—an assertion that raised alarms among survivors who have long believed that recordings were used as leverage and blackmail.

(That) morning, the Justice Department indicated via email to the group that Bondi would try to speak with survivors and expressed support for them, according to people familiar with the correspondence. But soon after, they were told that the attorney general would not be available after all, due to a medical appointment. One DOJ official familiar with Bondi’s schedule told me the attorney general “was at Walter Reed today for a prescheduled routine appointment,” and emphasized that “no call was missed,” because “that meeting was never scheduled.”

Meanwhile, Blanche appeared on Fox News and announced that the administration wouldn’t be hitting its deadline from Congress. Some files would be released, but many would not—at least not yet. Survivors were left with familiar feelings of disappointment and disillusionment, as well as unresolved questions: Why did the Trump administration change course last month on its promise to release all of the Epstein files if it wasn’t going to actually follow through? What was the government holding back—and why?

The failure to schedule a call with victims was only one piece of a broader, frantic rush inside Donald Trump’s Justice Department as it approached the final hours of its congressionally mandated deadline. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by Trump on November 19, requires the attorney general to make public, within 30 days, “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” in the DOJ’s possession that relate to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. The cache was believed to include flight logs, internal DOJ communications, and even records concerning the “destruction, deletion, alteration, misplacement, or concealment” of Epstein-related evidence.

The law tries to preempt a possible work-around by the DOJ. It explicitly bars the department from withholding, delaying, or redacting records because of “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity,” even for “any government official [or] public figure.”

Members of Congress and staff for the House Oversight Committee told me that they were alarmed by the DOJ’s silence in the days and hours before the release. Staff for Senator Jeff Merkley and Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie had repeatedly sought guidance from DOJ officials on what would be released and how the department was preparing. The lawmakers never got a response.

Victims said Bondi’s failure to talk with them prior to one of the most significant releases to date made them feel that those most harmed by Epstein’s crimes were just an afterthought. Marijke Chartouni was among the victims who had been hoping to talk with the attorney general before the files were made public. “Today marks a long-awaited moment for many of us,” Chartouni told me. “This is about truth, accountability, and confronting law-enforcement failure.”

Instead of truth, most of what the Justice Department released were blacked-out pages, entire paragraphs covered up to where you couldn't even tell what was being reported in the first place (via David Smith at the Guardian (US)):

Illustration: Guardian Design/Images via US Justice Department

But it soon became apparent that, once again, Donald Trump had over-promised and under-delivered. Many of the documents in the data dump were heavily redacted, with text blacked out so it was impossible to read. Norm Eisen, executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, said: “What they have released is clearly incomplete and appears to be over-redacted to boot.”

The documents extensively featured photos of former president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and appeared to include few if any photos of Trump or documents mentioning him, despite Trump and Epstein’s well-publicized friendship in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Far Right - not just trump - would like everyone to think the only one culpable in this scandal is Clinton, as though trying to get liberals to defend him as a way of making it easier for them to defend trump. Little realizing that nearly everyone on the Left knows Clinton is a sex pervert, came to terms with that years ago, and if Bill does get directly linked to anything criminal with Epstein's sex ring Democrats will be the first to throw him into the jail cell.

Moreover, Friday’s release was far from complete. US deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said “several hundred thousand” documents would be made public on Friday, but the need to protect the victims meant thousands more would be released over the next couple of weeks. The initial release also appeared to include far less than Blanche promised.

It smelled of a cover-up. And the rare reticence of Trump did little to dispel that notion... The president had spent much of this year resisting disclosure and denouncing the files as a “Democratic hoax”. But a rare bipartisan uprising in Congress forced him to cave and sign legislation last month mandating release of all unclassified Epstein records to be released by the end of 19 December in a searchable and downloadable format. His administration blew past that deadline and Democrats cried foul.

It's not the Democrats, though. At least one Republican in the House is upset by the delays and redactions and is teaming up with House Dems to bring Pam Bondi to account (via Andrea Hsu at NPR):

Two lawmakers are threatening a seldom-used congressional sanction against the Department of Justice over what they say is a failure to release all of its files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein by a deadline set in law.

Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie spearheaded the effort to force the Epstein files' release by co-sponsoring the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but both have said the release had too many redactions as well as missing information.

"I think the most expeditious way to get justice for these victims is to bring inherent contempt against Pam Bondi," Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, told CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday. "Basically Ro Khanna and I are talking about and drafting that right now."

It's questionable if anything to pressure Bondi is going to do anything to make trump relent on this cover-up. Don't forget, he brought in William Barr to be a replacement Attorney General just as the Mueller investigation into Russia's involvement in the 2016 election was getting closer to trump's sons, forcing a shutdown of that probe and a Mueller Report heavily redacted into uselessness.

We need to remember that after the first attempt by trump and his people to "release" the full Epstein Files turned into a debacle (because they basically rehashed everything already released) trump ordered the FBI to "flag any material mentioning trump in the Epstein Files" essentially for this moment when he's terrified of getting caught in acts he kept telling his MAGA base he never did.

With nearly every page blacked out - hidden behind more walls thrown up by trump and his lackeys - what else SHOULD we do? We can accept as fact: That every redacted line IS referring to donald trump and his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein committing illegal acts with young girls (and also possible money laundering). I mean, what can trump do, call us liars without exposing what's really behind those black lines?

There is one other thing we're able to read between all the redacted lines: This is all part of the horrifying culture among the political and wealthy elite that has existed for centuries abusing, molesting, destroying young women as part of a patriarchal mindset that they - rich, connected, untouchable - can do whatever they want without answering to any form of justice.

"If you're a star they let you do it" trump said in the moment he showed the whole world how vulgar he is, and it may be the only true thing he's ever said about the sordid world he and his fellow power elites live in.

We as a nation need to hold such corrupt people like trump to account. When the hell will any of those 77 million who voted for him in 2024 realize that and denounce that monster for the good of all?

Hit By the Shrapnel

Zaphod: Could be. I’m a pretty dangerous dude when I’m cornered.
Ford: Yeah. You go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.
-- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

donald trump gave a speech to the nation last night.

Well, not so much a speech as it was a full-tilt rant by an aging, rapacious, gaslighting freak.

I didn't watch it - I cannot handle that whining voice of his - but there were others who sacrificed their time and their brain cells to document the atrocity. And what they have to report is that it was a total disaster for a panicking and desperate trump (via Tom Sullivan at Digby's Hullabaloo): 

Criminal, murderous, and far less intelligent than Hans, the president of the United States Wednesday night delivered a jaw-dropping, ideological speech most notable for the red-alert pace of it. I haven’t spoken that fast since my first grade-school book report...

“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” Trump began. Nevertheless, whatever economic stress you feel, whatever grocery store sticker shock you experience, he didn’t do it, nobody saw him do it, you can’t prove anything.

America under Joe Biden, was “laughed at from all over the world. But they’re not laughing anymore,” Trump said, reprising one of his 40-year-old greatest-hit complaints. The world in fact “alternates between laughing and crying. Neither in a good way,” responded Ron Filipkowski.

“At times he seemed to be yelling,” reports The New York Times, “almost as if he didn’t believe he had to take the time to convince his audience of how well his first 11 months had gone.” The speech “included a long list of exaggerations and misleading statements” and no mention of consumers’ affordability concerns Trump has described as a Democratic “con job...”

It was a Gish gallop of lies that CNN’s Ana Navarro described as the “wah, wah, wah” teacher voice from Charlie Brown cartoons. CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, no stranger to rapid-fire debunking, had a go at Trump’s fictions and too little airtime to touch on them all...

Sullivan also gave a quick quote from Tom Nichols over at the Atlantic, but we need to read more of what Nichols observed:

The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.

When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years... He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.

We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.

In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.

There were concerns - rumors among the Far Right media types - that trump was going to use this speech to declare open war on Venezuela, as a follow-up to his orders to blockade and seize any more oil tankers. Instead, trump spent the speech rehashing old grievances, demanding our fealty and fear, and posing himself as a strong bully instead of a desperate crook drenching in flop sweat.

trump may be panicking over the current poll numbers that have him sinking to historic lows, especially on economic issues that can doom a party's midterm chances. he may be panicking over the reality that the congressional order to release a trove of Epstein documents - that can expose even more unsettling scandals tying trump to a known child sex trafficker - is due to happen this Friday. trump may be panicking over the reality that his unpopular tariffs could well be overturned by a Supreme Court who will bend to the needs of the corporations over that of trump's fantasies.

We could also be witnessing the mental breakdown of an unwell, aging, dementia-addled sociopath who needs to feel powerful and in control of everything around him, even though he's not.

The more trump panics, the more likely he's going to lash out in painful and dangerous ways.

Stay safe, people. We are going to deal with even nastier shit from this administration soon.

Playing Calvinball, Uh trumpball, With Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Life

I hadn't been following up on this case from April, as the situation surrounding it was in flux and under serious legal review. But a major step happened last week when the judge overseeing the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia ordered the man released from custody as well as ripping into trump's corrupted Justice Department for blatant lies and stonewalling (via Edith Olmsted at the New Republic): 

In a 31-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis granted Abrego Garcia’s request to be released from ICE custody. In her ruling, she torched the prosecutors’ efforts to deport Abrego Garcia to Liberia, after they claimed they could not deport him to the country of his choice, Costa Rica.

“This time, when the Court sought information about Liberia and Costa Rica so to fairly assess the validity of Abrego Garcia’s claims, Respondents did not just stonewall. They affirmatively misled the tribunal,” Xinis wrote.

“They announced that Liberia is the only viable removal option because Costa Rica ‘does not wish to receive him,’ … and that Costa Rica will no longer ‘accept the transfer’ of him,” she wrote. “But Costa Rica had never wavered in its commitment to receive Abrego Garcia, just as Abrego Garcia never wavered in his commitment to resettle there.”

Costa Rican officials had previously put in writing that they had no intention to remove Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador once he was in their custody—while Liberia had made no such assurances. Xinis wrote that the government’s continued lies made clear that Abrego Garcia’s lengthy detention was not for the basic purpose of a timely removal to the third country.

Xinis saw what a lot of others saw: there wasn't much legal foundation to what trump and his lawyers were doing in the first place.

Xinis also found that there was never any order for Abrego Garcia’s removal in the first place. “Indeed, Respondents twice sponsored the testimony of ICE officials whose job it is to effectuate removal orders, and who candidly admitted to having never seen one for Abrego Garcia,” she wrote.

Instead, the government argued that the court should take an October 10 “withholding decision” as evidence that an original order existed—but Xinis didn’t buy it. “The October 10 withholding decision is unambiguously not an order of removal,” she wrote.

Continued detention without a removal order violates Abrego Garcia’s rights under the Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as due process.

Of course, given the bullying and vengeful mindset of trump and his entire administration, DOJ lawyers tried to pull a runaround to Xinis' ruling by manufacturing a last-minute "removal order" from an immigration judge as though it would supersede the original order six years ago (something even enraging Andrew C McCarthy over at the National Review (yeah, I know!)):

In a nutshell, after months of playing “hide the ball” (or is it, “hide the lack of a ball”?) about whether there exists an order of removal authorizing Abrego’s detention and deportation, the Trump Justice Department has attempted to cure the absence of an order by what appears to be a blatantly illegal process: To wit, without notice to Abrego, the DOJ went ex parte to a DOJ immigration judge who lacks jurisdiction over the case, but who nevertheless dutifully issued a “sua sponte order correcting scrivener’s error” order, under which everyone is now supposed to pretend — Abracadabra! — that there was an order of removal all along.

I'm not a lawyer but I know a couple of them via Ta-Nehisi's Horde. Every single one of them were screaming (Upper Case Text) in the chat channels "THAT'S NOT WHAT A SCRIVENER'S ERROR DOES!" Along with their utter disgust at how trump's people are idiots with the legal system. Meanwhile:

The entire labyrinthine Abrego litigation — featuring immigration removal actions, habeas corpus claims, and a criminal prosecution that have collectively burdened the DOJ’s immigration tribunals, the district courts of Maryland and Tennessee, the Fourth Circuit, and the Supreme Court — has been pursued by the Trump DOJ on the premise that there was an order of removal, that had been issued in 2019 conterminously with IJ Jones’s order of withholding of removal to El Salvador.

The assumption was that the order of removal authorized Abrego’s expulsion from the United States, and that the order of withholding of removal was just a caveat that Abrego, a Salvadoran, could not be repatriated to his native country. That caveat was in place because (a) Abrego had convinced Jones that he reasonably feared persecution in El Salvador, (b) the DOJ, in the first Trump administration, did not appeal that dubious ruling (it allowed Abrego to be released to live and work in Maryland), and (c) the current Trump DOJ did not (as far as is publicly known) attempt to get the caveat removed based on, among other things, changed conditions in El Salvador...

But as Judge Xinis found, no order of removal was ever issued. The court asked the government to produce it for months; prosecutors neither produced it nor provided a straightforward explanation for its absence from the record – to say nothing of an explanation why, in the absence of the order, they would suddenly arrest Abrego without notice six years after releasing him and then controversially send him to a notorious counterterrorism prison in El Salvador — the one country to which it was explicitly forbidden to deport him...

Yet, as Xinis concluded, if there is no order of removal, then the case Abrego filed against the government cannot properly be deemed a removal proceeding. Rather, it is a habeas proceeding – a challenge claiming that, in the absence of a removal order, the government’s detention and removal of Abrego are illegal. While Xinis would have no jurisdiction to act in a removal proceeding under immigration law, federal district courts do have jurisdiction over habeas and related claims...

To repeat what I argued Friday, that’s an offer (Garcia agreeing to deport to Costa Rica) the DOJ should have leapt at. It would have drawn the curtain on this sorry saga. Instead, the DOJ tried to use Abrego’s desire to go to Costa Rica as leverage in plea negotiations in connection with the dubious criminal prosecution the DOJ brought in Tennessee. The DOJ’s refusal was also vindictive: The Abrego case has been an embarrassment, so rather than accommodate the Costa Rica transfer and end it, Abrego was kept in custody while the administration unsuccessfully tried to arrange his removal to African countries – which didn’t want to take Abrego and to which he didn’t want to go.

In any event, once the DOJ lost the case on Thursday, when Xinis ordered Abrego’s release, Attorney General Bondi and her subordinates apparently decided it was futile to continue resisting a concession that there never was a removal order. But rather than just beginning a new removal proceeding — for which there is a basis since there is no doubt that Abrego entered the country illegally and never obtained lawful status — the DOJ opted for chicanery.

On Thursday evening, without giving notice to Abrego’s counsel, prosecutors went to the aforementioned IJ Phillip Taylor. At a little after 7 p.m., Taylor issued an “Order of the Immigration Judge” with the subheading “Immigration Court’s Sua Sponte Order Correcting Scrivener’s Error...”

Essentially, Taylor has tried to insert a previously absent order of removal into the 2019 document (the order of withholding of removal), label the prior absence a “scrivener’s error” (i.e., a mere clerical mistake of negligible substantive importance), and backdate the whole thing by six years (the “nunc pro tunc” provision, as if what was not there had been there all along.

Perhaps most hilarious is the assertion that this was done “sua sponte” (i.e., of the judge’s own accord). It’s as if IJ Taylor just happened to be sitting in his office on a Thursday evening, thinking about IJ Jones’s six-year-old orders (as I guess IJs are wont to do), and suddenly decided, on his own, to correct what seemed to him to be a clerical error — as opposed to being induced by Trump DOJ officials to make a substantive addition to an order, the absence of which had caused them to lose a high-profile case earlier in the day...

The following Friday, Xinis reinforced her order to release Abrego Garcia and warned the federal government to not arrest him under any pretense. One hopes that when hearings resume during the work week that Xinis shreds the Justice Department lawyers for this circus and starts issuing sanctions and contempt charges.

Out of all of the immigration battles being waged in the United States right now - the mass deportation roundups, the violations of civil rights committed by ICE and Border Patrol goons, the decimation of an honest migrant workforce that's contributing to a growing economic recession - this one person's legal fight is representative of trump and the Far Right's entire war. But it's a little bit more because of one thing: trump made this personal.

Out of the hundreds of Latino - and African, and Asian, and non-White - men - and women and children(!) - getting detained, trump himself seemed to focus on Abrego Garcia as his perfect poster child of "criminal gang-related" stuff he and his staff want to paint in broad strokes across that entire population. By late April as the case gained national attention - and warnings from legal experts that the Justice and Homeland departments were on thin ice with this one - trump went on a media offensive that was offensive (via Julia Conley at Common Dreams):

The White House’s public response on Friday to an image of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who the Trump administration sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador last month, was to mock the migrant and the U.S. senator who successfully urged Salvadoran President Nayim Bukele to allow a visit with him—and critics said officials may come to regret that decision.

“I suspect this is going to show up in a variety of court pleadings,” said former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, who is now a law professor. “Whoever thought this was cute at the time may be less giddy when this becomes evidence of intent to disobey a court order...”

The story headline read, “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador”—but the White House crossed out the word “wrongly,” replaced “Maryland Man” with “MS-13 Illegal Alien,” and scrawled, “who’s never coming back” on the article about the father and sheet metal worker.

The digital graffiti was shared with the White House’s 1.6 million followers even though, as software engineer and writer Lakshya Jain said, “the White House admitted in court that they deported the wrong guy.”

Journalist David Leavitt added that the White House had given a federal court “more evidence of contempt,” two days after Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. warned that there was “probable cause... to find the government in criminal contempt”—punishable by fines or prison time...

The administration has also flouted the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling last week that found the White House must facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. Officials have admitted he was sent to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.” Although officials including Vice President JD Vance have called him a “convicted” gang member and Bukele repeatedly called him a “terrorist” in the White House earlier this week, Abrego Garcia has not been convicted of any crimes...

trump even took the time on social media to display a photo - later proved manufactured - of Abrego Garcia's "tattoos" as proof he was a major MS-13 gang leader. The whole thing was fake (via Louis Jacobson at PolitiFact):

"This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person,’" Trump’s post says. "They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles."

The figures M, S, 1 and 3 and the words below the symbols don’t appear in other photographs of Abrego Garcia’s hand, including the one taken by Salvadoran government officials (and shared on X by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele) when Abrego Garcia met with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., on April 17.

We asked the White House whether "MS-13" is tattooed on Abrego Garcia’s hand or whether the photo had been altered, perhaps to show that each of the pictorial tattoos represented one of those letters or numbers. The White House did not respond to our inquiry.

Several gang crime experts urged caution about assuming that any of the tattoos provide proof of MS-13 ties. MS-13 experts said the tattoos’ iconography was unfamiliar, and that those symbols have common meanings in mainstream tattooing...

Marijuana leaves, crosses and skulls are widely used as tattoos by people who do not belong to gangs. Gang crime experts said they did not stand out to them as MS-13 markers.

"I don’t believe a ‘dangerous individual’ would have such anodyne and farcically generic tattoos on his hand," said Liliana Castañeda Rossmann, a California State University San Marcos emerita professor of communication and author of the book "Transcending Gangs: Latinas Story Their Experience."

Sean Kennedy, a former federal public defender in California and now a Loyola Law School professor, said that in his experience representing and interacting with current and former MS-13 members, "The tattoos in the photo don't look familiar to me."

This is a burden on Abrego Garcia, not that he's facing legal challenges and deportation, but that trump has targeted Abrego Garcia for his racist ire.

Always remember: trump never admits to being in the wrong, he never will admit he lost anything (a legal challenge, a fight, an election, etc). In that, trump will blame others, he will claim he really won but his victory was "stolen," he will claim "vindication" even as he's forced to pay his victims in legal settlements. trump can never lose, ergo everyone else must.

This means that trump will never admit he was wrong regarding Abrego Garcia's situation. trump will double down on the lies and gaslighting, and he will enforce his underlings to do the same. he will insist the Justice Department pursue "every avenue" - i.e. manufacture any evidence - to ensure this one man gets convicted as a gang member criminal.

trump's DOJ lawyers are going to play fast, loose, and false with the legal system to twist reality to fit trump's fantasies. But the legal system - for all its faults - doesn't work like that. trump's going to run out of lawyers to do his bidding before he will shatter the American judiciary against his will.

In the meantime, here's hoping Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his family can rest - even for a brief moment - in the middle of this chaos.

"Like a Thoughtless Child, Just Wandering by a Garden Yanking Leaves Along the Way..."

We not only live in the Darkest Timeline, also we live in the DUMBEST Timeline.

"Third Place" Marco Rubio just declared war on typography (via Humeyra Pamuk at Reuters):

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.

What the... The default font in Microsoft Word is WOKE?

The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.

Anything positive for disabled people apparently triggers the Far Right...

Some studies suggest that sans-serif fonts, such as Calibri, are easier to read for those with certain visual disabilities.

Trump, a Republican, moved quickly after taking office in January to eradicate federal DEI programs and discourage them in the private sector and education, including by directing the firing of diversity officers at federal agencies and pulling grant funding for a wide range of programs.

DEI policies became more widespread after nationwide protests in 2020 against police killings of unarmed Black people, spurring a conservative backlash. Trump and other critics of diversity initiatives say they are discriminatory against white people and men and have eroded merit-based decision making.

All of the things that should matter in these dark times - ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine, ending Israel's devastation of both Gaza and the West Bank, stopping the war in Sudan, pulling back on trump's hostility towards Venezuela and most of Central/South America - Rubio is going after font usage because certain fonts offends the Far Right Male sensibilities.

I swear, I've seen this before in a Saturday Night Live skit:

You can just picture poor Marco suffering the way Ryan Gosling did:

Yeah. He just highlighted Avatar, he clicked the drop down menu and then he randomly selected Papyrus. Like a thoughtless child, just wandering by a garden yanking leaves along the way...

He just got away with it. This man, this professional graphic designer. Was it laziness? Was it cruelty...?

And now, here I am doing what I vowed to never do again, sitting outside his house, hoping to catch a glimpse of him to see him doing his little things, live his insane little life...

Ryan: Do you remember the Avatar logo?

Heidi: Um, yeah. It was tribal, yet futuristic.

Ryan: Papyrus!!!

(He sees the graphic designer glaring at him through a window)

Ryan: I know what you did! I... KNOW... WHAT... YOU... DID!!!

Seriously, if the Alpha Male Wannabes in the trump inner circle are obsessed with manliness, they should have gone with Trajan, a more accurate Roman based font.

Just one more thing that makes us THINK ABOUT ROME!!!

I can finally say Io Saturnalia, peeps!

The Corruption of Abusing Times

Update: Again, many thanks to Batocchio for including this blog article with Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please keep an eye out for Batocchio's annual Jon Swift blog share! Also please take the time to view the rest of the blog site, and consider ordering a copy of the story anthology Funny Locations off of Bookshop.org for the Saturnalia gift-giving season!

Now is the winter of our discontent...
(beat)
That's it. That's all I got.
-- modern day Will Shakespeare

You can see trump's corruption in plain view as he pardons everyone who can pay him off now or in the future (via Alex Woodward at the Independent (UK)): 

Within the first year of his second term in office, after campaigning on ending what he called the “politicization” of the Justice Department under his predecessor, Donald Trump has issued a historic number of pardons for white-collar criminals and political allies accused of fraud, bribery and corruption.

In more than a dozen cases, Trump even issued pardons for people who were prosecuted or convicted within his first and second terms, only to unravel those cases entirely this year. An entertainment executive accused of public corruption was pardoned this week only four months after he was indicted for conspiracy.

Trump’s pardon of former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who the Justice Department once said was at the center of the “largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world,” has not only raised questions about what’s fueling Trump’s lethal campaign against alleged drug traffickers but has also erased the work of Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney who was once a federal prosecutor leading the case against Hernández...

Trump’s wave of pardons — largely targeting charges that he has similarly faced — have relied on the sweeping powers of the executive branch to effectively redefine what is criminal, from bailing out dozens of people who support his agenda to “normalizing public corruption” and downplaying the crimes of convicted fraudsters who stripped millions of dollars from victims, according to former Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer.

Crimes involving public corruption — especially among elected officials, like Texas congressman Henry Cuellar, who was pardoned this week after he was federally charged last year with bribery, money laundering and conspiracy — are rarely considered for pardons.

But Trump is now “liberally pardoning corrupt public officials who are charged with offenses that involve abusing their political offices to enrich themselves,” Oyer told PBS.

Oyer, who was fired by the Trump administration in March, has called the president’s pardon streak a “crisis” that imperils democracy by using his vast pardoning power to potentially enrich himself and his allies...

You can see trump's corruption in plain view as he accepts a made-up "Peace Prize" by an organization - FIFA (aka the World Cup overseers) - that has a horrific history of scandal and corruption of their own (via Sophia Kai at Politico):

President Donald Trump’s appearance on the Kennedy Center stage will be at least his seventh encounter this year with FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who has logged more face time with Trump this year than any world leader. Infantino’s savvy navigation of the American political scene has helped FIFA build institutional support for a tournament facing unprecedented logistical complications.

But that success is beginning to weaken Infantino, as the third-term FIFA president faces newfound internal opposition for his over-the-top courtship of Trump. Our interviews with six international soccer officials across three continents reveal widespread frustration with Infantino’s decision to side with Trump even as White House policies cause chaos for World Cup-bound teams, fans and local organizers, clashing with Infantino’s promise to have a tournament that welcomes the world...

Our reporting found that Infantino did not inform his 37-member FIFA Council before creating the FIFA Peace Prize this year, three people familiar with the matter told POLITICO. Over the past year, at least three of FIFA’s eight vice presidents have publicly or privately expressed their concerns about the lengths Infantino is willing to go to please Trump...

Other appearances with Trump placed Infantino squarely between a president intent on solving overseas conflicts and punishing foes, while closing American borders to visitors and trade, and FIFA member nations who may hold starkly different views, or worse.

Infantino stood quietly in the Oval Office as he said he would not rule out strikes against fellow World Cup co-host Mexico to target drug cartels, and joined Trump’s entourage on a trip designed to cultivate investment opportunities in the Persian Gulf.

When FIFA had to delay the opening of its annual congress in Asuncion, Paraguay, to accommodate Infantino’s travel from a Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh, two FIFA vice presidents were among those who joined English Football Association chairwoman Debbie Hewitt and other federation heads exiting in protest. European confederation UEFA — with 55 member nations, FIFA’s largest — attacked him with unusually pointed language...

Nothing threatens to awaken opposition to Infantino as much as his decision to invent a FIFA Peace Prize just as Trump began to complain in October about being passed over for one from the Norwegian Nobel Committee. According to a draft run-of-show for Friday’s draw, Trump is scheduled to speak for two minutes today after receiving the Peace Prize.

“He is just implementing what he said he would do,” Infantino said at an American Business Forum in Miami, also attended by Trump, on the day news of the prize was made public. “So I think we should all support what he’s doing because I think it’s looking pretty good.”

According to FIFA rules, the organization’s president needs sign-off from the 37-member FIFA council on certain items like the international match calendar, host designations for upcoming FIFA tournaments, and financial matters. FIFA’s charter does not contemplate the creation of a new prize specifically to award a world leader, but those familiar with the organization’s governance say it may violate an ethics policy that requires officers “remain politically neutral...”

You can see trump's corruption in plain view as he violates the letter and spirit of the Emolument Clause as he vacuums up more money to himself and his inner circle with acts that make Teapot Dome seem tame (via Robert Reich at Inequality Media):

But as soon as Trump won, money started pouring in. 

And then just days before returning to office, Trump launched a separate crypto scheme, selling TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins. Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency based on an image or online joke.

But this is no joke: The Trump family has made about $3 billion from crypto so far — with many purchases by foreign buyers. Forbes now estimates that over half of Trump’s entire net worth is crypto-based.

And with Trump acting as both the President of the United States and as his own crypto brand ambassador, it’s hard to tell which job he’s doing at any given moment. 

Around the time that Trump made a state visit to the United Arab Emirates, a UAE firm announced it would buy $2 billion of Trump’s World Liberty Financial currency. 

Do Trump crypto buyers get presidential favors in return? Well, one US company said it explicitly purchased $2 million of Trump’s memecoins to influence trade policy. 

And then there’s Chinese billionaire Justin Sun. You might have heard of him because he spent $6.2 million buying an avant garde art installation that was a banana duct taped to a wall — which he then ate. 

What you might not have not heard was that Sun was charged with crypto-related fraud. But after Trump was elected, Sun invested more than $115 million into various Trump crypto products.

Guess what happened next? Trump’s SEC suddenly stopped prosecuting Sun. How curious and bizarre...!

We as a nation are facing a massive crisis, where the decision-making at the highest levels of our government are bought and sold - by an elite few, and by foreign powers in opposition to the United States - at the expense of millions of Americans facing threats to their wallets, their livelihoods, and their families.

I've been screaming this about trump - his greed, his twisted passions, his destructive ways - for years now. It's just that now he's so open and reckless about it that nobody can deny it or look away (of course, the MAGAts will try to anyway).

This is one of the reasons I haven't been in the mood to celebrate Saturnalia for awhile.

May the gods damn trump and his enablers forever.

The Price of Arrogance Is the Blood of Others

"They're not confessing."
"They're bragging."
-- from The Big Short movie

Update: Many thanks to Steve in Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars Mike's Blog Round-Up! I'd like to say Io Saturnalia but this is not a festive time is it. /rage

It's been reported earlier how our United States military is committing war crimes in the Caribbean by bombing civilian fishing boats claiming they're drug smuggling as part of trump's - and Hegseth's - desire to turn the War on Drugs into a hot war against half of Central and South America.

The horror of what they're doing came into sharper focus this weekend when the Washington Post picked up on how the decision-making into those boat strikes went, including the point where Hegseth pushed to "kill them all" including any survivors (via Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima, there is a paywall):

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

What's at issue here are both the constitutional ideal of due process and the right of criminal suspects to face their charges in courts of law, and also the international laws protecting civilians from questionable military strikes. Summarily killing these boaters - and in spite of the analysts vibes, there's no viable proof they are smuggling drugs - increases the likelihood our nation is killing innocent people.

We're witnessing an escalation of war being pushed by unserious people obsessed - yet again - with body counts and the appearance of "rugged manly leadership". Hegseth and trump's behavior throughout this nightmare has gotten to the point where the partisan sides of the Senate are joining forces to condemn what's happening (via Jacob Wendler at Politico):

Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) — both of whom sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — said Sunday that, if accurate, such orders would rise to the level of war crimes.

“If that reporting is true, it’s a clear violation of the DOD’s own laws of war, as well as international laws about the way you treat people who are in that circumstance. And so this rises to the level of a war crime if it’s true,” Kaine said in an interview with CBS’ Nancy Cordes on “Face the Nation...”

Bipartisan leadership of the Armed Services Committees in both chambers vowed to probe the matter, with Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) promising “vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances” on Friday.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) told Cordes on Sunday that “if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that would be an illegal act,” and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said on ABC’s “This Week” that “if it was as if the article said, that is a violation of the law of war.”

All of this is happening because a Far Right Supreme Court gave their seal of approval to the Unitary Executive theory where presidents can wield extensive and unstoppable powers to do whatever they want. They've granted these powers to a bullying, gaslighting sociopath in trump who's allowing the sociopaths among his lackeys to indulge in acts of cruelty towards everyone they fear and hate.

The arrogance of Hegseth is how he views the entire idea of War: That rather than play by rules and regulations designed to reduce risk of civilian casualties and even loss of our own troops to reckless acts, Hegseth prefers to grant soldiers full license to use excessive force (meaning "kill 'em all" and declare victory).

Hegseth is the kind of person who wouldn't have seen the ethical conflict surrounding My Lai. The need to avoid more bloodshed in war is meaningless to him. The concept of maintaining order through soft power is alien to the likes of him. He wants a body count and he wants to revel in it.

Hegseth's desire to "strike fast, strike hard, kill them all" echoes in the trumpian agenda of inflicting that firepower on our own communities, be it hunting down immigrants or threatening "woke" cities with occupation while militarizing our police into thugs.

The cruelty remains the point. Not only as policy but as an attempt to keep themselves in power through brutality and lawless indulgence.

This arrogance will turn allies into enemies soon enough. And the downward spiral into violence will speed up some more.

Gods help us.