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1000 results for “mid_kid”
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Wrote a silly script to showcase how to use unshare + chroot/pivot_root in order to manually enter a #linux #chroot / #container without needing #root privileges:
https://gist.github.com/mid-kid/9293f4f0617052b9c3aa45422fb89f90
I rarely see anyone mention how this can be done without needing to reach for #bubblewrap or systemd-nspawn, and I think it's important to see how you can leverage the primitives that drive container technology.
The script can be simplified, but not without sacrificing correctness. I hope the comments help.
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Shoutouts to the type of #fanfiction that makes it blatantly obvious there were supposed to be sex scenes, and it doesn't take much digging to find the author's patreon or w/e where they keep the NSFW bits.
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Shoutouts to the type of #fanfiction that makes it blatantly obvious there were supposed to be sex scenes, and it doesn't take much digging to find the author's patreon or w/e where they keep the NSFW bits.
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Reminder to plug your old and dusty #3ds cartridges into your console occasionally, to avoid them corrupting themselves over time!
Ideally, you can verify them using this tool: https://gbatemp.net/threads/corrupted-cartridge-fixer-release.628539/My copy of smash was behaving wonkily (hanging at random moments, mostly), and even though I've managed to get into a fight, the tool is finding many other bad blocks and fixing them :)
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Reminder to plug your old and dusty #3ds cartridges into your console occasionally, to avoid them corrupting themselves over time!
Ideally, you can verify them using this tool: https://gbatemp.net/threads/corrupted-cartridge-fixer-release.628539/My copy of smash was behaving wonkily (hanging at random moments, mostly), and even though I've managed to get into a fight, the tool is finding many other bad blocks and fixing them :)
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Reminder to plug your old and dusty #3ds cartridges into your console occasionally, to avoid them corrupting themselves over time!
Ideally, you can verify them using this tool: https://gbatemp.net/threads/corrupted-cartridge-fixer-release.628539/My copy of smash was behaving wonkily (hanging at random moments, mostly), and even though I've managed to get into a fight, the tool is finding many other bad blocks and fixing them :)
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TIL #microchip still makes new PIC18 #microcontroller designs with modern peripherals like I3C, cheap development boards, and even a DIP option. Hard to find exact dates but the one I'm looking at (PIC18-Q20) lists 2021 in the copyright.
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Are there any "advanced" #android rooting/modding support channels? Places where I can ask things like:
* Is it possible for me to decrypt and mount the /data partition manually from the lineageos recovery?
* What exactly was it that google changed about play integrity that broke bypasses? It doesn't seem to affect microg, will it in the future?
* How are secrets stored in the keystore and can I disable the hardware keystore to make backups work? -
Having users of your project be confronted with developer tooling is generally a bad idea.
This is yet another example why: https://github.com/pret/agbcc/issues/84
Unfortunately, the projects associated with this tool are in a weird limbo where the point of it is being able to build modify the source files, but is also meant to be used by non-programmers. I'm not sure how that can be improved...
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Managed to get an Articuno from the GTS as well. This concludes filling the national dex, sans a few events. I'm lacking Mew and (apparently) Diancie.
I have some 20th anniversary events I can trade for those, so if anyone is up for trading, I'd love it.
(Sorry @rootcompute if you had that articuno for me...)
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Progress report: Registered Staravia, Levanny, Ambipom, Lopunny, Mismagius, Lumineon. Going for the simple fodder still.
Filled out the gen3 boxes, gen2 and gen6 are already filled, lacking Mew and the birds for gen1, gen4 will be done once I evolve the other staravia and grind BP for the electrizer/magmarizer, after which I can focus on gen5.
I really didn't leave a lot left to complete back in 2016
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Being back playing #pokemon #oras for a while again and filling up the remainder of the dex I definitely remember why I really enjoyed this entry and consider it a really solid one: There's a lot to do in the region after beating the game, and it ties in very neatly with postgame grinding. I think I've revisited just about every corner of the region just training new pokemon, visiting secret bases, farming berries and rebattling trainers, where in other games I'd just stick to one spot.
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Ask Me synchronicity ... 18 years later
In 2006, ninazer0 asked for help identifying three works of English juvenile historical fiction, later finding the answer to one of the mystery texts.
In 2024, tangerine asked about mid-century kids' historical fiction about the Hanseatic League, and paduasoy's suggestion was not the author OP was looking for -- but it did resolve the remaining earlier mystery! Then melisande added more info for the earlier question. Delightful!
#resolved #AskMetafilter #question #synchronicity #Juvenile #Historical #Fiction
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ovw2CpXXqW0&feature=share Early to mid aughts via #Kid606 was a great time in music, I miss the excitement of guys onstage with Pismo PowerBooks killing it.. :)
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In October 2010 the wife and I headed to upstate New York for the regrettable task of combing through her parents’ home after her mother passed away and before the house was sold. Like so many generations before us, it was our job to comb through the accreted objects of two lifetimes and find anything we wanted to preserve.
Here are 5 photos from our exploration, revealing tiny pieces of the 20th century shining through a family’s life in America at its height.
My wife’s father was something of a photo buff, with a variety of cameras, including some fascinating early Polaroid models.The View-Master was a staple of mid-20th-century kids toy boxes, with swappable disks that held tiny positive film frames arranged to provide a stereoscopic view of various still-image stories. Fairy tales, cartoons, and more were the subjects. This particular model was one of the first.My wife’s father was a soldier in World War II and had this German first aid kit filled with war memorabilia he’d collected. That included things like formal medals from the United States—including a Purple Heart—but also some Nazi gear, taken from… well… we don’t know. He refused to talk about his experiences in the war (which… yeah… that’s fair).The obsession with cameras meant there was a huge collection of 8mm films captured though the 1960s and 1970s. He filmed typical stuff—family gatherings, vacations, and other events. In the years since we converted all the reels into video.And here’s the camera that captured all those family memories on silent 8mm film. The camera required manually cranking the geared mechanism on the side, which apparently would apply tension to a spring inside, which would then release the tension as mechanical energy at a set rate ideal for pulling film through and releasing the camera shutter.What’s remarkable to me, looking back now, is thinking about how future generations will acquire our massive digital libraries, but the source objects that shot our videos and photos will be largely lost.
And so it goes.
https://digitalpolity.com/2024/08/04/5-photos-decades-of-life-revealed-after-death/
#8mm #camera #death #film #homeMovie #photos #Polaroid #ViewMaster #WorldWarII #WW2 #WWII
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it's hard to imagine that back in the mid-90s, the stiff and strait-laced MS had an entire department for making kids multimedia
their edutainment department was mostly independent of the rest of the monster, and produced some really unique educational software. Dinosaurs is one of their best - the combination of high production value, solid paleontological detail, and skeumorphic interfaces makes for a totally memorable experience.
i found this non-interactive demo buried in the program. i heard one of the former MS developers mention recently that scenes like these were built in Macromedia Director, and then nested within the program (built in C/C++) using a Director runtime.
you might notice the weird random b+w noise around the window, and in some of the background. that's a byproduct of the team using indexed palettes to handle the hundreds of compressed images. every single image was run through DeBabelizer to extract its index, and then averaged with other images to find shared colour palettes from 256 colours. the team had to make sure that the colour palette chosen never intruded into the "safe palette" used by the window frame, titlebar, and background. obviously, this one paletting error snuck past QA.
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it's hard to imagine that back in the mid-90s, the stiff and strait-laced MS had an entire department for making kids multimedia
their edutainment department was mostly independent of the rest of the monster, and produced some really unique educational software. Dinosaurs is one of their best - the combination of high production value, solid paleontological detail, and skeumorphic interfaces makes for a totally memorable experience.
i found this non-interactive demo buried in the program. i heard one of the former MS developers mention recently that scenes like these were built in Macromedia Director, and then nested within the program (built in C/C++) using a Director runtime.
you might notice the weird random b+w noise around the window, and in some of the background. that's a byproduct of the team using indexed palettes to handle the hundreds of compressed images. every single image was run through DeBabelizer to extract its index, and then averaged with other images to find shared colour palettes from 256 colours. the team had to make sure that the colour palette chosen never intruded into the "safe palette" used by the window frame, titlebar, and background. obviously, this one paletting error snuck past QA.
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it's hard to imagine that back in the mid-90s, the stiff and strait-laced MS had an entire department for making kids multimedia
their edutainment department was mostly independent of the rest of the monster, and produced some really unique educational software. Dinosaurs is one of their best - the combination of high production value, solid paleontological detail, and skeumorphic interfaces makes for a totally memorable experience.
i found this non-interactive demo buried in the program. i heard one of the former MS developers mention recently that scenes like these were built in Macromedia Director, and then nested within the program (built in C/C++) using a Director runtime.
you might notice the weird random b+w noise around the window, and in some of the background. that's a byproduct of the team using indexed palettes to handle the hundreds of compressed images. every single image was run through DeBabelizer to extract its index, and then averaged with other images to find shared colour palettes from 256 colours. the team had to make sure that the colour palette chosen never intruded into the "safe palette" used by the window frame, titlebar, and background. obviously, this one paletting error snuck past QA.
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it's hard to imagine that back in the mid-90s, the stiff and strait-laced MS had an entire department for making kids multimedia
their edutainment department was mostly independent of the rest of the monster, and produced some really unique educational software. Dinosaurs is one of their best - the combination of high production value, solid paleontological detail, and skeumorphic interfaces makes for a totally memorable experience.
i found this non-interactive demo buried in the program. i heard one of the former MS developers mention recently that scenes like these were built in Macromedia Director, and then nested within the program (built in C/C++) using a Director runtime.
you might notice the weird random b+w noise around the window, and in some of the background. that's a byproduct of the team using indexed palettes to handle the hundreds of compressed images. every single image was run through DeBabelizer to extract its index, and then averaged with other images to find shared colour palettes from 256 colours. the team had to make sure that the colour palette chosen never intruded into the "safe palette" used by the window frame, titlebar, and background. obviously, this one paletting error snuck past QA.
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it's hard to imagine that back in the mid-90s, the stiff and strait-laced MS had an entire department for making kids multimedia
their edutainment department was mostly independent of the rest of the monster, and produced some really unique educational software. Dinosaurs is one of their best - the combination of high production value, solid paleontological detail, and skeumorphic interfaces makes for a totally memorable experience.
i found this non-interactive demo buried in the program. i heard one of the former MS developers mention recently that scenes like these were built in Macromedia Director, and then nested within the program (built in C/C++) using a Director runtime.
you might notice the weird random b+w noise around the window, and in some of the background. that's a byproduct of the team using indexed palettes to handle the hundreds of compressed images. every single image was run through DeBabelizer to extract its index, and then averaged with other images to find shared colour palettes from 256 colours. the team had to make sure that the colour palette chosen never intruded into the "safe palette" used by the window frame, titlebar, and background. obviously, this one paletting error snuck past QA.
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2 second high-impact action courtesy of For Our Kids Alberta:
Sign this letter: https://www.forourkids.ca/meth…
It will be presented to Steven Guilbeault at COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan this upcoming week. They need as many #BC, #Alberta, #Saskatchewan residents to sign BEFORE MID-DAY TOMORROW (that's Sunday!).
Regulating methane emissions is low-hanging fruit. Please share!
#Methane #MethaneEmissions #ClimateAction #ClimateCrisis #ForOurKids #Canada #COP29
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2 second high-impact action courtesy of For Our Kids Alberta: https://www.forourkids.ca/methane_letter#newmode-embed-29990-68686
This letter will be presented to Steven Guilbeault at COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan this upcoming week. They need as many #BC, #Alberta, #Saskatchewan residents to sign as possible BEFORE MID-DAY TOMORROW.
Regulating methane emissions is low-hanging fruit. Please share!
#Methane #MethaneEmissions #ClimateAction #ClimateCrisis #ForOurKids #Canada #COP29
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#Leonard #Leo was born on Long Island in the mid-sixties.
When he was only a toddler, he lost his father — a pastry chef — to cancer.
At the age of five, his mother remarried, and the Leos moved to New Jersey, where he attended Monroe Township High School.
Leo was chosen as the “Most Likely to Succeed”
a distinction he shared with classmate #Sally #Schroeder, his future wife.
In the yearbook, the two were shown sitting next to each other, holding wads of cash and with dollar signs painted on their glasses.
He was so effective at raising money for his senior prom that his classmates nicknamed him the “Moneybags Kid.”
Throughout his life, he remained steeped in the deep Catholicism of his grandfather, who had emigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager;
his grandparents attended Mass daily, and encouraged the young Leonard to follow their lead.
After high school, Leo went to Cornell University, studying under a group of conservative academics in the university’s department of government
and with the wider national backdrop of iconoclastic scholars led by Yale University’s #Robert #Bork and the University of Chicago’s #Antonin #Scalia, who were building the case for a novel legal doctrine known as #originalism.
He got a series of internships in Washington, D.C., during the final years of the Reagan administration,
then returned to Cornell to join the law school, where in 1989 he founded the local chapter of a student organization called the #Federalist #Society.
That group had been set up by three conservative-leaning students from Yale, Harvard, and Chicago seven years earlier as a way of challenging what they saw as the dominance of liberal ideology at the country’s law schools.After graduating, Leo married Sally, who had been raised as a Protestant but who used to go to Catholic Mass five times every weekend because she played the organ.
She decided to convert not long before her marriage.
The couple moved back to Washington, where Leo clerked for a judge on the court of appeals and became close with another appellate judge who had recently been appointed to the D.C. circuit
— a man from Georgia called #Clarence #Thomas,
who had toyed with becoming a Catholic priest.Despite being ten years older and from much more humble origins,
Thomas shared Leo’s conservative outlook, and the two soon developed a deep friendship that would endure for many years.During this period, Leo was asked by the Federalist Society to become its first employee
— although he delayed his start date so that he could help his good friend Thomas through his contentious confirmation process for the Supreme Court.Despite accusations of sexual harassment hanging over him, Thomas won Senate confirmation by a slim margin.
It would be the first in a series of fights in which Leo would have to put aside the teachings of his Christian faith as he focused on the greater goal of pushing through a conservative revolution of the courts and of society at large.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/opus-dei-leonard-leo-supreme-court-moneybags-kid-1235115538/ -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Slow News Day–Just Kidding.
Good Afternoon!!
By Susan McLaughlin
I wonder if we will ever see another slow news day. Before Trump came on the political scene, I can recall days when I struggled to find interesting stories to post. It has been a decade now since that happened. Even when Biden was president, Trump managed to dominate the news. I’m just so sick and tired of him. But he will continue to be the top story even if Democrats take over the House and Senate next year. If that happens, he’ll be impeached and–I hope–prosecuted. If only he would just go away!
It’s the weekend, and the news is once again overwhelming. I’m going to begin with a couple of immigration stories from my home territory.
Sarah Betancourt at WGBH: Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide.
Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test. The naturalization ceremony is the final step to the process, where the oath of allegiance and a citizenship certificate are granted.
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
“One of our clients said that she had gone to her oath ceremony because she hadn’t received the cancellation notice in time,” said Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship. “She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”
That client, a Haitian woman in her 50s, has had a green card since the early 2000s and started working with Project Citizenship in January. She declined an interview request through Breslow.
“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”
She said many clients with upcoming ceremonies and USCIS appointments have received cancellations via an online portal. She shared an example of the notices they’re receiving, which provide no further guidance or instructions.
“One person was, you know, asking … what did I do wrong? Why is this happening to me? And, you know, needed to be reassured that it wasn’t anything she had done. This wasn’t her fault,” Breslow said.
Read more at the link. This is so heartbreaking. Trump is destroying our country’s image around the world. I doubt if we can recover from his destruction in my lifetime.
Man and Cat by Stu Morris 2020
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the arrest of the mother of White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt’s nephew. Her name is Bruna Caroline Ferreira, and she is still in ICE custody in Louisiana.
Here’s an update on this story published at WBUR on Thursday: Brother of White House press secretary Leavitt had contentious custody battle with ex, now in ICE custody.
PLAISTOW, N.H. — In this rural town just across the Massachusetts line, the Leavitt family runs a used-car dealership, with hulking work trucks lined up in the front lot. Inside the lobby, a giant TV blares Fox News, and a framed photo features President Donald Trump, posing with owners Bob and Erin Leavitt.
A New Hampshire family once best known for selling cars and ice cream, the Leavitts were thrust into the national spotlight this year when their 27-year-old daughter, Karoline, was named White House press secretary. Ten months later, the administration’s war on illegal immigration landed in the Leavitts’ backyard.
Bruna Ferreira — a Brazilian immigrant who shares an 11-year-old child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt — was arrested by ICE in mid-November. Ferreira, 33, remains in custody in Louisiana. The boy lives with his father in New Hampshire.
Ferreira’s sister and lawyer had claimed there was no animosity between Ferreira and the Leavitts. But court records, police reports and family text chains reviewed by WBUR tell a vastly different story — one of a bitter custody battle, years-old allegations of a threat to call immigration authorities, and concerns for the well-being of the child when his mother was staying in a vacant mansion in Cohasset.
The arrest, first reported by WBUR, has sparked questions about whether the Leavitts used their inroads to the White House to put ICE onto Ferreira’s trail. Karoline Leavitt has denied any involvement in the arrest. And Michael Leavitt, 35, told WBUR on Thursday that neither he nor anyone else in his family called ICE on the mother of his son: “Absolutely not,” he said in a text response to questions.
ICE accused Ferreira of overstaying a visa that ran out in 1999 and of a battery arrest. Ferreira’s lawyer has said he’s unaware of crimes on her record. He said she’d been unable to renew the legal status she had under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Leavitt’s brother was asked about this.
Asked whether Karoline Leavitt would do anything to help Ferreira get released, Michael Leavitt told WBUR, “I would never ask my sister to abuse her government position to help anyone, including me — nor would I ever assume she would do so.”
Instead, Leavitt said, he and his father urged Ferreira’s sister to get her to self-deport. Leavitt said by agreeing to be deported — rather than being forced to leave through the removal process — she could one day return to the U.S.
The sister, Graziela Dos Santos Rodrigues, said she called Karoline Leavitt after the arrest. She still hasn’t heard back.
There quite a bit of interesting detail in the story about the relationship between Leavitt’s brother and his ex-wife. Among other things, Ferreira claims that Leavitt owes $70,000 in child support. I would not be at all surprised if Ferreira was specifically targeted by the White House.
Prisac Nicholai, Self, Portrait with My Cat
It’s beginning to look like Pete Hegseth may be in trouble following the uproar about the double strike on a “drug” boat in September, reported by The Washington Post and the recent report on “Signalgate,” the scandal about Hegseth using Signal to discuss top secret information.
Joseph Gedeon at The Guardian: Pressure grows on ‘reckless’ Hegseth as twin scandals engulf Pentagon chief.
Pete Hegseth is facing the most serious crisis of his tenure as defense secretary, engulfed by allegations of war crimes in the Caribbean and a blistering inspector general report accusing him of mishandling classified military intelligence. Yet despite the long list of trouble and as lawmakers from both parties call for his resignation, Hegseth shows no signs of stepping down and still holds Donald Trump’s support.
The twin crises have engulfed the former Fox News personality in separate but overlapping allegations that lawmakers, policy experts and former officials say reveal a pattern of dangerous recklessness at the helm of the Pentagon. Democratic legislators have reignited calls for his ouster after revelations that survivors clinging to wreckage from a September boat strike were deliberately killed in a “double-tap” attack, while a defense department investigation released on Thursday concluded he violated Pentagon policies by sharing sensitive details via the Signal messaging app hours before airstrikes in Yemen.
The most recent controversy comes as the Caribbean campaign centers on the Trump administration’s extrajudicial strikes against suspected drug smugglers, which have killed at least 87 people across 22 attacks since September. Trump has justified the operation as essential to combating fentanyl trafficking, claiming each destroyed vessel saves 25,000 American lives, though factcheckers, former officials and drug policy experts have called this figure absurd, noting that fentanyl primarily enters the United States overland from Mexico, not via Caribbean boats from Venezuela.
The legality of the strikes came under intense scrutiny after the public learned that two men who survived the initial 2 September attack could been seen amid the wreckage when a lethal follow-up strike was ordered. While Hegseth initially dismissed the reporting as fabricated, he later confirmed the basic facts during a cabinet meeting this week, saying he acted in the “fog of war” but “didn’t stick around” to observe the rest of the mission.
Senator Patty Murray, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate appropriations committee, called for Hegseth’s firing following a bipartisan briefing on the incident on Thursday. “Between overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean, risking US servicemembers’ lives by sharing war plans on Signal, and so much else, it could not be more obvious that Secretary Hegseth is unfit for the role, and it is past time for him to go,” Murray said.
Hegseth is an incompetent moron, but so are all of Trump’s other cabinet members.
Garrett Owen at Salon: “It’s bad”: Lawmakers shocked at video of strike on survivors of alleged drug boat.
Video footage of a highly controversial second strike on an alleged drug boat in September was shown to lawmakers in Washington, shocking and disgusting some, while others defended the decision to target survivors.
Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees viewed the footage in a closed-door meeting with military brass involved in the strikes. The video showed a suspected drug boat operating in the Caribbean, being struck, and then being struck again as two survivors appeared to cling to wreckage.
“This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told The New Republic in an interview. Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was told that the survivors were “capable of returning to the fight.” He disagrees, though he contends that the boats may have been transporting drugs.
“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith said, calling it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Fellow lawmakers Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., were appalled by the footage. Himes called it “one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service.” Reed said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video.
“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” Reed said.
Some Republican tried to defend the strikes.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. called the second strike “righteous” and “highly lawful and lethal.” Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said the strikes were carried out in a “highly professional manner.”
I guess we’ll find out, since Trump has said he would release the complete film of the attacks.
Cats Painting, by Fred Bell
If you’re interested in a deep dive about Hegseth’s situation, here’s a gift link to a piece at the Atlantic by Missy Ryan, Nancy A. Youssef, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Jonathan Lemire: Pete Hegseth Is Seriously Testing Trump’s ‘No Scalps’ Rule.
The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender. Then a second explosion finished the men off, leaving only a bloody stain on the surface of the sea. Footage of the two men’s desperate final moments made some viewers nauseated, leading one to nearly vomit. “It was worse than we had been led to believe,” one person told us.
The video was part of a briefing that Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, gave lawmakers yesterday about the September 2 attack. Bradley told legislators that, after consulting military lawyers, he authorized the follow-on strike, judging that the men still posed a threat because of what they could have done: radioed for help or been picked up with what remained of their cargo of suspected cocaine. The video suggested they didn’t actually do any of that, but Bradley defended his decisions in the first episode of the Trump administration’s newly militarized counternarcotics campaign.
Republicans and Democrats who watched the grainy footage drew different conclusions about whether Bradley’s actions were justified. But many also sounded exasperated that once again they were dealing with controversy sparked by Bradley’s boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And after 10 months of turbulence under Hegseth’s leadership, the Republican-led Congress is now showing signs of exercising its oversight powers.
Read the whole thing at The Atlantic.
Andrew Solender at Axios: Scoop: Democrats call Trump’s bluff on releasing boat strike video.
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are pressing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to release video of U.S. military strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat that have inflamed tensions on Capitol Hill.
Why it matters: The lawmakers are seizing on to President Trump’s own comments this week that he would have “no problem” releasing the footage to the public.
“We look forward to your prompt response and release of this footage to the public, as has already been promised by President Trump,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to Hegseth that was obtained by Axios.
“The American people deserve transparency on these attacks,” they wrote, “it is your obligation to release the footage.” [….]
What they’re saying: “We write to request that you release all audio and video footage from the kinetic strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean on September 2, 2025, including the follow-on strikes,” the Democrats wrote in their letter.
“Our concern stems from reports that you, as Secretary of Defense, issued an order to ‘kill everybody,’ followed by additional strikes seeking to kill the two remaining unarmed, shipwrecked individuals.”
The letter was signed by 19 of the 27 Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. Ryan’s office told Axios they reached out to Republicans as well, but none signed.
Yesterday, Dakinikat posted an article from The Economist about the Trump administration’s newly announced “security strategy” which denigrates Europe and praises Russia.
Here’s another analysis of the “strategy” by Anton Troianovski at The New York Times (gift link): Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy.
Latin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.
The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.
Михалыч и Васильич», 2023
President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”
The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”
Personally, I don’t see that as a good thing. Use the gift link to read more.
I wonder if Donald Trump has ever been in a grocery store. I really doubt it. He doesn’t seem to understand the lives of ordinary Americans at all. He has no concept of what it’s like to worry about having enough money to pay the bills or to put food on the table. Someone else handles all those things for him. And frankly, he couldn’t care less if children are starving and families can’t pay the rent or mortgage. The only reason he has to care at all is because those people can vote. Right now, he’s making it clear he doesn’t give a shit.
Naftali Bendavid at The Washington Post: Trump struggles to persuade Americans to ignore affordability issues.
President Donald Trump has said drug prices are falling by as much as 1,500 percent, a mathematical impossibility. He has declared himself “the affordability president,” while dismissing the affordability issue as “a con job by the Democrats.”
Trump also vows that good times are coming. He has predicted that gas prices, which now hover around $3 a gallon, will plummet to $2. He has promised Americans $2,000 refund checks from the revenue raised by tariffs. He has suggested that “in the not-too-distant future,” no one will have to pay income tax.
This flurry of sometimes extravagant claims comes amid a growing Republican fear, fueled by recent election results, that high prices could set the stage for a Democratic sweep in next year’s midterms. So far, there is little evidence that Trump’s urgent attempt to shift the economic storyline is working.
By Sergey Levin
“Any Republican who refuses to admit we have an affordability problem is not listening to the American people,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) said. “It’s real because the American people think it’s real. I cannot overstate that — in a free country it’s the people who define what is real, not the politicians.” [….]
Trump’s plight is a striking turnabout. In last year’s campaign, Trump scored political points by highlighting Americans’ inflation concerns, and President Joe Biden faced the almost impossible task of convincing voters they were not as bad off as they thought.
Strategists of both parties note that Trump — who has often seemed to defy the laws of politics — is struggling with the affordability issue as he has with few others. The president shrugged off criticism after he accepted a luxury plane from a foreign country, pardoned unsavory figures and demolished a third of the White House, for example — episodes that might be devastating to another politician.
This seems different. Alarm bells have gone off for Republicans since Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections, then performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district. A Democrat could capture the Miami mayor’s office next Tuesday in heavily Republican Florida.
“He often exists in an alternative reality that many of his followers are happy to follow him into, but the affordability issue is kryptonite for him, because even his most devoted followers know which way is up when it comes to prices,” said Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. “He may be able to convince people of his alternative vision in lots of different areas, but not this one.”
Economic issues are going to kill the Republicans in 2026 if Trump continues to live in a fantasy world.
NBC News: ‘People aren’t dumb’: Republicans worry they’re not doing enough on affordability.
Congressional Republicans are starting to publicly and privately sound the alarm about their party’s disjointed strategy to address Americans’ affordability concerns, with some growing increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump’s sometimes cavalier attitude toward the subject.
While Republicans say the high cost of living is a problem they inherited from President Joe Biden, many GOP lawmakers still think their party needs to sharpen its own message and platform ahead of the midterms — or else it could cost them their tenuous majorities in Congress.
“If we don’t do that, we would be morons, because the economy is very much on people’s minds,” Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, told NBC News. Democrats “failed to really hammer the economy, and it cost them the election,” he added. “If we as Republicans fail to do the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if we had a similar turnout.”
Nearly two dozen Republican senators, House members, strategists and congressional aides shared their concerns about their party’s handling of affordability in interviews with NBC News. Another six acknowledged the issue but said the party will settle on the right strategy to address it.
Their comments come after Democrats have secured wins in many of this year’s elections, with voters citing economic concerns, and as Trump has dismissed the issue as a Democratic “hoax,” rhetoric that has privately frustrated some Republicans.
Read the rest at NBC News.
Those are the stories that captured my interest today. What’s on your mind?
#affordabilityCrisis #boatStrikes #brunaCarolineFerreira #donaldTrump #immigrants #karolineLeavitt #naturalization #peteHegseth #signalgate #trumpAdministrationSecurityStrategy
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Slow News Day–Just Kidding.
Good Afternoon!!
By Susan McLaughlin
I wonder if we will ever see another slow news day. Before Trump came on the political scene, I can recall days when I struggled to find interesting stories to post. It has been a decade now since that happened. Even when Biden was president, Trump managed to dominate the news. I’m just so sick and tired of him. But he will continue to be the top story even if Democrats take over the House and Senate next year. If that happens, he’ll be impeached and–I hope–prosecuted. If only he would just go away!
It’s the weekend, and the news is once again overwhelming. I’m going to begin with a couple of immigration stories from my home territory.
Sarah Betancourt at WGBH: Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide.
Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test. The naturalization ceremony is the final step to the process, where the oath of allegiance and a citizenship certificate are granted.
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
“One of our clients said that she had gone to her oath ceremony because she hadn’t received the cancellation notice in time,” said Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship. “She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”
That client, a Haitian woman in her 50s, has had a green card since the early 2000s and started working with Project Citizenship in January. She declined an interview request through Breslow.
“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”
She said many clients with upcoming ceremonies and USCIS appointments have received cancellations via an online portal. She shared an example of the notices they’re receiving, which provide no further guidance or instructions.
“One person was, you know, asking … what did I do wrong? Why is this happening to me? And, you know, needed to be reassured that it wasn’t anything she had done. This wasn’t her fault,” Breslow said.
Read more at the link. This is so heartbreaking. Trump is destroying our country’s image around the world. I doubt if we can recover from his destruction in my lifetime.
Man and Cat by Stu Morris 2020
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the arrest of the mother of White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt’s nephew. Her name is Bruna Caroline Ferreira, and she is still in ICE custody in Louisiana.
Here’s an update on this story published at WBUR on Thursday: Brother of White House press secretary Leavitt had contentious custody battle with ex, now in ICE custody.
PLAISTOW, N.H. — In this rural town just across the Massachusetts line, the Leavitt family runs a used-car dealership, with hulking work trucks lined up in the front lot. Inside the lobby, a giant TV blares Fox News, and a framed photo features President Donald Trump, posing with owners Bob and Erin Leavitt.
A New Hampshire family once best known for selling cars and ice cream, the Leavitts were thrust into the national spotlight this year when their 27-year-old daughter, Karoline, was named White House press secretary. Ten months later, the administration’s war on illegal immigration landed in the Leavitts’ backyard.
Bruna Ferreira — a Brazilian immigrant who shares an 11-year-old child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt — was arrested by ICE in mid-November. Ferreira, 33, remains in custody in Louisiana. The boy lives with his father in New Hampshire.
Ferreira’s sister and lawyer had claimed there was no animosity between Ferreira and the Leavitts. But court records, police reports and family text chains reviewed by WBUR tell a vastly different story — one of a bitter custody battle, years-old allegations of a threat to call immigration authorities, and concerns for the well-being of the child when his mother was staying in a vacant mansion in Cohasset.
The arrest, first reported by WBUR, has sparked questions about whether the Leavitts used their inroads to the White House to put ICE onto Ferreira’s trail. Karoline Leavitt has denied any involvement in the arrest. And Michael Leavitt, 35, told WBUR on Thursday that neither he nor anyone else in his family called ICE on the mother of his son: “Absolutely not,” he said in a text response to questions.
ICE accused Ferreira of overstaying a visa that ran out in 1999 and of a battery arrest. Ferreira’s lawyer has said he’s unaware of crimes on her record. He said she’d been unable to renew the legal status she had under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Leavitt’s brother was asked about this.
Asked whether Karoline Leavitt would do anything to help Ferreira get released, Michael Leavitt told WBUR, “I would never ask my sister to abuse her government position to help anyone, including me — nor would I ever assume she would do so.”
Instead, Leavitt said, he and his father urged Ferreira’s sister to get her to self-deport. Leavitt said by agreeing to be deported — rather than being forced to leave through the removal process — she could one day return to the U.S.
The sister, Graziela Dos Santos Rodrigues, said she called Karoline Leavitt after the arrest. She still hasn’t heard back.
There quite a bit of interesting detail in the story about the relationship between Leavitt’s brother and his ex-wife. Among other things, Ferreira claims that Leavitt owes $70,000 in child support. I would not be at all surprised if Ferreira was specifically targeted by the White House.
Prisac Nicholai, Self, Portrait with My Cat
It’s beginning to look like Pete Hegseth may be in trouble following the uproar about the double strike on a “drug” boat in September, reported by The Washington Post and the recent report on “Signalgate,” the scandal about Hegseth using Signal to discuss top secret information.
Joseph Gedeon at The Guardian: Pressure grows on ‘reckless’ Hegseth as twin scandals engulf Pentagon chief.
Pete Hegseth is facing the most serious crisis of his tenure as defense secretary, engulfed by allegations of war crimes in the Caribbean and a blistering inspector general report accusing him of mishandling classified military intelligence. Yet despite the long list of trouble and as lawmakers from both parties call for his resignation, Hegseth shows no signs of stepping down and still holds Donald Trump’s support.
The twin crises have engulfed the former Fox News personality in separate but overlapping allegations that lawmakers, policy experts and former officials say reveal a pattern of dangerous recklessness at the helm of the Pentagon. Democratic legislators have reignited calls for his ouster after revelations that survivors clinging to wreckage from a September boat strike were deliberately killed in a “double-tap” attack, while a defense department investigation released on Thursday concluded he violated Pentagon policies by sharing sensitive details via the Signal messaging app hours before airstrikes in Yemen.
The most recent controversy comes as the Caribbean campaign centers on the Trump administration’s extrajudicial strikes against suspected drug smugglers, which have killed at least 87 people across 22 attacks since September. Trump has justified the operation as essential to combating fentanyl trafficking, claiming each destroyed vessel saves 25,000 American lives, though factcheckers, former officials and drug policy experts have called this figure absurd, noting that fentanyl primarily enters the United States overland from Mexico, not via Caribbean boats from Venezuela.
The legality of the strikes came under intense scrutiny after the public learned that two men who survived the initial 2 September attack could been seen amid the wreckage when a lethal follow-up strike was ordered. While Hegseth initially dismissed the reporting as fabricated, he later confirmed the basic facts during a cabinet meeting this week, saying he acted in the “fog of war” but “didn’t stick around” to observe the rest of the mission.
Senator Patty Murray, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate appropriations committee, called for Hegseth’s firing following a bipartisan briefing on the incident on Thursday. “Between overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean, risking US servicemembers’ lives by sharing war plans on Signal, and so much else, it could not be more obvious that Secretary Hegseth is unfit for the role, and it is past time for him to go,” Murray said.
Hegseth is an incompetent moron, but so are all of Trump’s other cabinet members.
Garrett Owen at Salon: “It’s bad”: Lawmakers shocked at video of strike on survivors of alleged drug boat.
Video footage of a highly controversial second strike on an alleged drug boat in September was shown to lawmakers in Washington, shocking and disgusting some, while others defended the decision to target survivors.
Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees viewed the footage in a closed-door meeting with military brass involved in the strikes. The video showed a suspected drug boat operating in the Caribbean, being struck, and then being struck again as two survivors appeared to cling to wreckage.
“This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told The New Republic in an interview. Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was told that the survivors were “capable of returning to the fight.” He disagrees, though he contends that the boats may have been transporting drugs.
“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith said, calling it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Fellow lawmakers Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., were appalled by the footage. Himes called it “one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service.” Reed said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video.
“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” Reed said.
Some Republican tried to defend the strikes.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. called the second strike “righteous” and “highly lawful and lethal.” Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said the strikes were carried out in a “highly professional manner.”
I guess we’ll find out, since Trump has said he would release the complete film of the attacks.
Cats Painting, by Fred Bell
If you’re interested in a deep dive about Hegseth’s situation, here’s a gift link to a piece at the Atlantic by Missy Ryan, Nancy A. Youssef, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Jonathan Lemire: Pete Hegseth Is Seriously Testing Trump’s ‘No Scalps’ Rule.
The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender. Then a second explosion finished the men off, leaving only a bloody stain on the surface of the sea. Footage of the two men’s desperate final moments made some viewers nauseated, leading one to nearly vomit. “It was worse than we had been led to believe,” one person told us.
The video was part of a briefing that Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, gave lawmakers yesterday about the September 2 attack. Bradley told legislators that, after consulting military lawyers, he authorized the follow-on strike, judging that the men still posed a threat because of what they could have done: radioed for help or been picked up with what remained of their cargo of suspected cocaine. The video suggested they didn’t actually do any of that, but Bradley defended his decisions in the first episode of the Trump administration’s newly militarized counternarcotics campaign.
Republicans and Democrats who watched the grainy footage drew different conclusions about whether Bradley’s actions were justified. But many also sounded exasperated that once again they were dealing with controversy sparked by Bradley’s boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And after 10 months of turbulence under Hegseth’s leadership, the Republican-led Congress is now showing signs of exercising its oversight powers.
Read the whole thing at The Atlantic.
Andrew Solender at Axios: Scoop: Democrats call Trump’s bluff on releasing boat strike video.
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are pressing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to release video of U.S. military strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat that have inflamed tensions on Capitol Hill.
Why it matters: The lawmakers are seizing on to President Trump’s own comments this week that he would have “no problem” releasing the footage to the public.
“We look forward to your prompt response and release of this footage to the public, as has already been promised by President Trump,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to Hegseth that was obtained by Axios.
“The American people deserve transparency on these attacks,” they wrote, “it is your obligation to release the footage.” [….]
What they’re saying: “We write to request that you release all audio and video footage from the kinetic strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean on September 2, 2025, including the follow-on strikes,” the Democrats wrote in their letter.
“Our concern stems from reports that you, as Secretary of Defense, issued an order to ‘kill everybody,’ followed by additional strikes seeking to kill the two remaining unarmed, shipwrecked individuals.”
The letter was signed by 19 of the 27 Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. Ryan’s office told Axios they reached out to Republicans as well, but none signed.
Yesterday, Dakinikat posted an article from The Economist about the Trump administration’s newly announced “security strategy” which denigrates Europe and praises Russia.
Here’s another analysis of the “strategy” by Anton Troianovski at The New York Times (gift link): Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy.
Latin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.
The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.
Михалыч и Васильич», 2023
President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”
The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”
Personally, I don’t see that as a good thing. Use the gift link to read more.
I wonder if Donald Trump has ever been in a grocery store. I really doubt it. He doesn’t seem to understand the lives of ordinary Americans at all. He has no concept of what it’s like to worry about having enough money to pay the bills or to put food on the table. Someone else handles all those things for him. And frankly, he couldn’t care less if children are starving and families can’t pay the rent or mortgage. The only reason he has to care at all is because those people can vote. Right now, he’s making it clear he doesn’t give a shit.
Naftali Bendavid at The Washington Post: Trump struggles to persuade Americans to ignore affordability issues.
President Donald Trump has said drug prices are falling by as much as 1,500 percent, a mathematical impossibility. He has declared himself “the affordability president,” while dismissing the affordability issue as “a con job by the Democrats.”
Trump also vows that good times are coming. He has predicted that gas prices, which now hover around $3 a gallon, will plummet to $2. He has promised Americans $2,000 refund checks from the revenue raised by tariffs. He has suggested that “in the not-too-distant future,” no one will have to pay income tax.
This flurry of sometimes extravagant claims comes amid a growing Republican fear, fueled by recent election results, that high prices could set the stage for a Democratic sweep in next year’s midterms. So far, there is little evidence that Trump’s urgent attempt to shift the economic storyline is working.
By Sergey Levin
“Any Republican who refuses to admit we have an affordability problem is not listening to the American people,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) said. “It’s real because the American people think it’s real. I cannot overstate that — in a free country it’s the people who define what is real, not the politicians.” [….]
Trump’s plight is a striking turnabout. In last year’s campaign, Trump scored political points by highlighting Americans’ inflation concerns, and President Joe Biden faced the almost impossible task of convincing voters they were not as bad off as they thought.
Strategists of both parties note that Trump — who has often seemed to defy the laws of politics — is struggling with the affordability issue as he has with few others. The president shrugged off criticism after he accepted a luxury plane from a foreign country, pardoned unsavory figures and demolished a third of the White House, for example — episodes that might be devastating to another politician.
This seems different. Alarm bells have gone off for Republicans since Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections, then performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district. A Democrat could capture the Miami mayor’s office next Tuesday in heavily Republican Florida.
“He often exists in an alternative reality that many of his followers are happy to follow him into, but the affordability issue is kryptonite for him, because even his most devoted followers know which way is up when it comes to prices,” said Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. “He may be able to convince people of his alternative vision in lots of different areas, but not this one.”
Economic issues are going to kill the Republicans in 2026 if Trump continues to live in a fantasy world.
NBC News: ‘People aren’t dumb’: Republicans worry they’re not doing enough on affordability.
Congressional Republicans are starting to publicly and privately sound the alarm about their party’s disjointed strategy to address Americans’ affordability concerns, with some growing increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump’s sometimes cavalier attitude toward the subject.
While Republicans say the high cost of living is a problem they inherited from President Joe Biden, many GOP lawmakers still think their party needs to sharpen its own message and platform ahead of the midterms — or else it could cost them their tenuous majorities in Congress.
“If we don’t do that, we would be morons, because the economy is very much on people’s minds,” Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, told NBC News. Democrats “failed to really hammer the economy, and it cost them the election,” he added. “If we as Republicans fail to do the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if we had a similar turnout.”
Nearly two dozen Republican senators, House members, strategists and congressional aides shared their concerns about their party’s handling of affordability in interviews with NBC News. Another six acknowledged the issue but said the party will settle on the right strategy to address it.
Their comments come after Democrats have secured wins in many of this year’s elections, with voters citing economic concerns, and as Trump has dismissed the issue as a Democratic “hoax,” rhetoric that has privately frustrated some Republicans.
Read the rest at NBC News.
Those are the stories that captured my interest today. What’s on your mind?
#affordabilityCrisis #boatStrikes #brunaCarolineFerreira #donaldTrump #immigrants #karolineLeavitt #naturalization #peteHegseth #signalgate #trumpAdministrationSecurityStrategy
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Slow News Day–Just Kidding.
Good Afternoon!!
By Susan McLaughlin
I wonder if we will ever see another slow news day. Before Trump came on the political scene, I can recall days when I struggled to find interesting stories to post. It has been a decade now since that happened. Even when Biden was president, Trump managed to dominate the news. I’m just so sick and tired of him. But he will continue to be the top story even if Democrats take over the House and Senate next year. If that happens, he’ll be impeached and–I hope–prosecuted. If only he would just go away!
It’s the weekend, and the news is once again overwhelming. I’m going to begin with a couple of immigration stories from my home territory.
Sarah Betancourt at WGBH: Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide.
Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test. The naturalization ceremony is the final step to the process, where the oath of allegiance and a citizenship certificate are granted.
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
“One of our clients said that she had gone to her oath ceremony because she hadn’t received the cancellation notice in time,” said Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship. “She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”
That client, a Haitian woman in her 50s, has had a green card since the early 2000s and started working with Project Citizenship in January. She declined an interview request through Breslow.
“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”
She said many clients with upcoming ceremonies and USCIS appointments have received cancellations via an online portal. She shared an example of the notices they’re receiving, which provide no further guidance or instructions.
“One person was, you know, asking … what did I do wrong? Why is this happening to me? And, you know, needed to be reassured that it wasn’t anything she had done. This wasn’t her fault,” Breslow said.
Read more at the link. This is so heartbreaking. Trump is destroying our country’s image around the world. I doubt if we can recover from his destruction in my lifetime.
Man and Cat by Stu Morris 2020
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the arrest of the mother of White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt’s nephew. Her name is Bruna Caroline Ferreira, and she is still in ICE custody in Louisiana.
Here’s an update on this story published at WBUR on Thursday: Brother of White House press secretary Leavitt had contentious custody battle with ex, now in ICE custody.
PLAISTOW, N.H. — In this rural town just across the Massachusetts line, the Leavitt family runs a used-car dealership, with hulking work trucks lined up in the front lot. Inside the lobby, a giant TV blares Fox News, and a framed photo features President Donald Trump, posing with owners Bob and Erin Leavitt.
A New Hampshire family once best known for selling cars and ice cream, the Leavitts were thrust into the national spotlight this year when their 27-year-old daughter, Karoline, was named White House press secretary. Ten months later, the administration’s war on illegal immigration landed in the Leavitts’ backyard.
Bruna Ferreira — a Brazilian immigrant who shares an 11-year-old child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt — was arrested by ICE in mid-November. Ferreira, 33, remains in custody in Louisiana. The boy lives with his father in New Hampshire.
Ferreira’s sister and lawyer had claimed there was no animosity between Ferreira and the Leavitts. But court records, police reports and family text chains reviewed by WBUR tell a vastly different story — one of a bitter custody battle, years-old allegations of a threat to call immigration authorities, and concerns for the well-being of the child when his mother was staying in a vacant mansion in Cohasset.
The arrest, first reported by WBUR, has sparked questions about whether the Leavitts used their inroads to the White House to put ICE onto Ferreira’s trail. Karoline Leavitt has denied any involvement in the arrest. And Michael Leavitt, 35, told WBUR on Thursday that neither he nor anyone else in his family called ICE on the mother of his son: “Absolutely not,” he said in a text response to questions.
ICE accused Ferreira of overstaying a visa that ran out in 1999 and of a battery arrest. Ferreira’s lawyer has said he’s unaware of crimes on her record. He said she’d been unable to renew the legal status she had under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Leavitt’s brother was asked about this.
Asked whether Karoline Leavitt would do anything to help Ferreira get released, Michael Leavitt told WBUR, “I would never ask my sister to abuse her government position to help anyone, including me — nor would I ever assume she would do so.”
Instead, Leavitt said, he and his father urged Ferreira’s sister to get her to self-deport. Leavitt said by agreeing to be deported — rather than being forced to leave through the removal process — she could one day return to the U.S.
The sister, Graziela Dos Santos Rodrigues, said she called Karoline Leavitt after the arrest. She still hasn’t heard back.
There quite a bit of interesting detail in the story about the relationship between Leavitt’s brother and his ex-wife. Among other things, Ferreira claims that Leavitt owes $70,000 in child support. I would not be at all surprised if Ferreira was specifically targeted by the White House.
Prisac Nicholai, Self, Portrait with My Cat
It’s beginning to look like Pete Hegseth may be in trouble following the uproar about the double strike on a “drug” boat in September, reported by The Washington Post and the recent report on “Signalgate,” the scandal about Hegseth using Signal to discuss top secret information.
Joseph Gedeon at The Guardian: Pressure grows on ‘reckless’ Hegseth as twin scandals engulf Pentagon chief.
Pete Hegseth is facing the most serious crisis of his tenure as defense secretary, engulfed by allegations of war crimes in the Caribbean and a blistering inspector general report accusing him of mishandling classified military intelligence. Yet despite the long list of trouble and as lawmakers from both parties call for his resignation, Hegseth shows no signs of stepping down and still holds Donald Trump’s support.
The twin crises have engulfed the former Fox News personality in separate but overlapping allegations that lawmakers, policy experts and former officials say reveal a pattern of dangerous recklessness at the helm of the Pentagon. Democratic legislators have reignited calls for his ouster after revelations that survivors clinging to wreckage from a September boat strike were deliberately killed in a “double-tap” attack, while a defense department investigation released on Thursday concluded he violated Pentagon policies by sharing sensitive details via the Signal messaging app hours before airstrikes in Yemen.
The most recent controversy comes as the Caribbean campaign centers on the Trump administration’s extrajudicial strikes against suspected drug smugglers, which have killed at least 87 people across 22 attacks since September. Trump has justified the operation as essential to combating fentanyl trafficking, claiming each destroyed vessel saves 25,000 American lives, though factcheckers, former officials and drug policy experts have called this figure absurd, noting that fentanyl primarily enters the United States overland from Mexico, not via Caribbean boats from Venezuela.
The legality of the strikes came under intense scrutiny after the public learned that two men who survived the initial 2 September attack could been seen amid the wreckage when a lethal follow-up strike was ordered. While Hegseth initially dismissed the reporting as fabricated, he later confirmed the basic facts during a cabinet meeting this week, saying he acted in the “fog of war” but “didn’t stick around” to observe the rest of the mission.
Senator Patty Murray, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate appropriations committee, called for Hegseth’s firing following a bipartisan briefing on the incident on Thursday. “Between overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean, risking US servicemembers’ lives by sharing war plans on Signal, and so much else, it could not be more obvious that Secretary Hegseth is unfit for the role, and it is past time for him to go,” Murray said.
Hegseth is an incompetent moron, but so are all of Trump’s other cabinet members.
Garrett Owen at Salon: “It’s bad”: Lawmakers shocked at video of strike on survivors of alleged drug boat.
Video footage of a highly controversial second strike on an alleged drug boat in September was shown to lawmakers in Washington, shocking and disgusting some, while others defended the decision to target survivors.
Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees viewed the footage in a closed-door meeting with military brass involved in the strikes. The video showed a suspected drug boat operating in the Caribbean, being struck, and then being struck again as two survivors appeared to cling to wreckage.
“This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told The New Republic in an interview. Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was told that the survivors were “capable of returning to the fight.” He disagrees, though he contends that the boats may have been transporting drugs.
“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith said, calling it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Fellow lawmakers Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., were appalled by the footage. Himes called it “one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service.” Reed said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video.
“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the President has agreed to do,” Reed said.
Some Republican tried to defend the strikes.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. called the second strike “righteous” and “highly lawful and lethal.” Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said the strikes were carried out in a “highly professional manner.”
I guess we’ll find out, since Trump has said he would release the complete film of the attacks.
Cats Painting, by Fred Bell
If you’re interested in a deep dive about Hegseth’s situation, here’s a gift link to a piece at the Atlantic by Missy Ryan, Nancy A. Youssef, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Jonathan Lemire: Pete Hegseth Is Seriously Testing Trump’s ‘No Scalps’ Rule.
The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender. Then a second explosion finished the men off, leaving only a bloody stain on the surface of the sea. Footage of the two men’s desperate final moments made some viewers nauseated, leading one to nearly vomit. “It was worse than we had been led to believe,” one person told us.
The video was part of a briefing that Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, gave lawmakers yesterday about the September 2 attack. Bradley told legislators that, after consulting military lawyers, he authorized the follow-on strike, judging that the men still posed a threat because of what they could have done: radioed for help or been picked up with what remained of their cargo of suspected cocaine. The video suggested they didn’t actually do any of that, but Bradley defended his decisions in the first episode of the Trump administration’s newly militarized counternarcotics campaign.
Republicans and Democrats who watched the grainy footage drew different conclusions about whether Bradley’s actions were justified. But many also sounded exasperated that once again they were dealing with controversy sparked by Bradley’s boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And after 10 months of turbulence under Hegseth’s leadership, the Republican-led Congress is now showing signs of exercising its oversight powers.
Read the whole thing at The Atlantic.
Andrew Solender at Axios: Scoop: Democrats call Trump’s bluff on releasing boat strike video.
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are pressing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to release video of U.S. military strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat that have inflamed tensions on Capitol Hill.
Why it matters: The lawmakers are seizing on to President Trump’s own comments this week that he would have “no problem” releasing the footage to the public.
“We look forward to your prompt response and release of this footage to the public, as has already been promised by President Trump,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to Hegseth that was obtained by Axios.
“The American people deserve transparency on these attacks,” they wrote, “it is your obligation to release the footage.” [….]
What they’re saying: “We write to request that you release all audio and video footage from the kinetic strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean on September 2, 2025, including the follow-on strikes,” the Democrats wrote in their letter.
“Our concern stems from reports that you, as Secretary of Defense, issued an order to ‘kill everybody,’ followed by additional strikes seeking to kill the two remaining unarmed, shipwrecked individuals.”
The letter was signed by 19 of the 27 Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. Ryan’s office told Axios they reached out to Republicans as well, but none signed.
Yesterday, Dakinikat posted an article from The Economist about the Trump administration’s newly announced “security strategy” which denigrates Europe and praises Russia.
Here’s another analysis of the “strategy” by Anton Troianovski at The New York Times (gift link): Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy.
Latin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.
The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.
Михалыч и Васильич», 2023
President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”
The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”
Personally, I don’t see that as a good thing. Use the gift link to read more.
I wonder if Donald Trump has ever been in a grocery store. I really doubt it. He doesn’t seem to understand the lives of ordinary Americans at all. He has no concept of what it’s like to worry about having enough money to pay the bills or to put food on the table. Someone else handles all those things for him. And frankly, he couldn’t care less if children are starving and families can’t pay the rent or mortgage. The only reason he has to care at all is because those people can vote. Right now, he’s making it clear he doesn’t give a shit.
Naftali Bendavid at The Washington Post: Trump struggles to persuade Americans to ignore affordability issues.
President Donald Trump has said drug prices are falling by as much as 1,500 percent, a mathematical impossibility. He has declared himself “the affordability president,” while dismissing the affordability issue as “a con job by the Democrats.”
Trump also vows that good times are coming. He has predicted that gas prices, which now hover around $3 a gallon, will plummet to $2. He has promised Americans $2,000 refund checks from the revenue raised by tariffs. He has suggested that “in the not-too-distant future,” no one will have to pay income tax.
This flurry of sometimes extravagant claims comes amid a growing Republican fear, fueled by recent election results, that high prices could set the stage for a Democratic sweep in next year’s midterms. So far, there is little evidence that Trump’s urgent attempt to shift the economic storyline is working.
By Sergey Levin
“Any Republican who refuses to admit we have an affordability problem is not listening to the American people,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) said. “It’s real because the American people think it’s real. I cannot overstate that — in a free country it’s the people who define what is real, not the politicians.” [….]
Trump’s plight is a striking turnabout. In last year’s campaign, Trump scored political points by highlighting Americans’ inflation concerns, and President Joe Biden faced the almost impossible task of convincing voters they were not as bad off as they thought.
Strategists of both parties note that Trump — who has often seemed to defy the laws of politics — is struggling with the affordability issue as he has with few others. The president shrugged off criticism after he accepted a luxury plane from a foreign country, pardoned unsavory figures and demolished a third of the White House, for example — episodes that might be devastating to another politician.
This seems different. Alarm bells have gone off for Republicans since Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections, then performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district. A Democrat could capture the Miami mayor’s office next Tuesday in heavily Republican Florida.
“He often exists in an alternative reality that many of his followers are happy to follow him into, but the affordability issue is kryptonite for him, because even his most devoted followers know which way is up when it comes to prices,” said Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. “He may be able to convince people of his alternative vision in lots of different areas, but not this one.”
Economic issues are going to kill the Republicans in 2026 if Trump continues to live in a fantasy world.
NBC News: ‘People aren’t dumb’: Republicans worry they’re not doing enough on affordability.
Congressional Republicans are starting to publicly and privately sound the alarm about their party’s disjointed strategy to address Americans’ affordability concerns, with some growing increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump’s sometimes cavalier attitude toward the subject.
While Republicans say the high cost of living is a problem they inherited from President Joe Biden, many GOP lawmakers still think their party needs to sharpen its own message and platform ahead of the midterms — or else it could cost them their tenuous majorities in Congress.
“If we don’t do that, we would be morons, because the economy is very much on people’s minds,” Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, told NBC News. Democrats “failed to really hammer the economy, and it cost them the election,” he added. “If we as Republicans fail to do the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if we had a similar turnout.”
Nearly two dozen Republican senators, House members, strategists and congressional aides shared their concerns about their party’s handling of affordability in interviews with NBC News. Another six acknowledged the issue but said the party will settle on the right strategy to address it.
Their comments come after Democrats have secured wins in many of this year’s elections, with voters citing economic concerns, and as Trump has dismissed the issue as a Democratic “hoax,” rhetoric that has privately frustrated some Republicans.
Read the rest at NBC News.
Those are the stories that captured my interest today. What’s on your mind?
#affordabilityCrisis #boatStrikes #brunaCarolineFerreira #donaldTrump #immigrants #karolineLeavitt #naturalization #peteHegseth #signalgate #trumpAdministrationSecurityStrategy