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November 26, 2025

The Morning Report — 11/26/25

—J.J. Sefton

Good morning kids. Yes, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a thing. But from Chi-Com run "police stations" in major American cities with Chinese immigrant communities, to Chinese intelligence assets everywhere from research labs to the Confucius Institutes on our campuses, to vast tracts of farmland and real estate bordering our military installations owned by the Chi-Coms, and to actual Chinese intel assets embedded in the administrations of local, state and even national governmental officials, dig a bit deeper into the story of several high level American politicians, all ex service members and some still in the reserves, creating a video essentially encouraging American military personnel to commit acts of insubordination and perhaps even insurrection and Treason by as they say "disobeying any illegal orders from the Commander-in-Chief, that being President Trump.

I have never served in the military, but from what I understand of training, every recruit, especially those who are in the officer corps whether coming up through the ranks or as graduates of our military academies, are thoroughly instructed as to what constitutes an "illegal order" and at the very least have the barest minimum of moral turpitude and conscience to know the difference between right and wrong in the context of carrying out their mission. And so in my estimation, we have propagandists and much worse, foreign-influenced agents provocateurs internally sowing dissent in the ranks and laying the groundwork for actual mutiny.

So, the despicable reprehensible behavior of Senator Mark Kelly almost comes as no shock:

On Monday, the Department of War announced that Kelly, a retired Navy captain, could be “recall[ed] to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures” because of his participation in what has now been dubbed the “Seditious Six” video. . . While Kelly’s participation in his party’s “Seditious Six” gambit is certainly egregious, it shouldn’t be considered surprising. For years, the Arizona Democrat has regularly undertaken actions that undermine America’s national security. . .
. . . the Arizona senator criticized the Trump Pentagon’s plans to investigate the retired general [Mark (vanilli) Milley]for reportedly telling his Chinese counterpart that the Trump-led U.S. had no intention of attacking China, and that he would “call [Beijing] ahead of time” if Trump were to launch such an offensive. Rather than condemn Milley’s purported actions, Kelly leapt to his defense. . . It’s almost fitting that Kelly’s apparent lack of concern over Milley’s reported actions involved America’s greatest geopolitical adversary, given the retired Navy captain’s extensive ties to entities connected to the Chinese Communist Party. . . As has been widely reported in recent years, prior to becoming a senator, Kelly co-founded the Arizona-based space tourism company World View in 2012. According to a 2020 report by RealClearPolitics’ Susan Crabtree, World View received investment funds in 2014 and 2016 from Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that owns (and reportedly monitors) the Chinese messaging app WeChat. (Tencent is also known for suspending streaming of NBA games in 2019 after a league general manager voiced support for the Hong Kong protestors.) . . .But Kelly’s role in World View is just the tip of the iceberg. In 2020, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Arizona Democrat was an adviser to and “held a significant financial interest in a Colorado company that partnered with a Chinese state-financed tech giant to bring supersonic aerospace technology to China in 2018,

Just as surely as mythical Senator Pat Geary was owned by Don Emilio Barzini, Mark Kelly is likely owned by Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. Period Full Stop. And as absolutely disastrous as it would be for one American politician especially at this level to essentially be an intelligence asset of our greatest foreign rival if not enemy (which they sure as hell are) the horrifying reality is that Kelly is not a one-off.

Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) has filed a federal civil lawsuit against President Donald J. Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director Bill Pulte, accusing him of violating privacy laws by accessing his confidential mortgage records. Swalwell claims these records were improperly used to refer him to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for an investigation into mortgage and tax fraud allegations.The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Pulte engaged in “unprecedented and unlawful” practices by obtaining mortgage records through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Swalwell, who recently announced his candidacy for Governor of California, stated that the disclosure of these records damaged his reputation at a critical political moment.Pulte has also referred other prominent Democrats, including Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), and Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, to the DOJ for investigation. Schiff and James have denied wrongdoing, while Cook is challenging her removal from the Federal Reserve Board by the Trump administration in a case the Supreme Court will hear in January.

Swalwell is small potatoes, but he is illustrative of how far down the corruptibility of our politicians and others to foreign influence, in this case the Chi-Coms, goes. He was given the nickname of Yum-Yum by GOP Rep Troy Nehls for the former's intimate relationship with know Chinese spy Christine Fang. Currently: Eric Swalwell is a member of the House Committee on the Judiciary and the House Committee on Homeland Security. He also serves on the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law and the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. Yeah, shagging a Chi-Com spy is no big deal in this context, is it?!

But all that said, what would happen in the event that Red China attacked or attempted to invade and conquer Taiwan by force as they have been planning and itching to do since 1949 and for the past several years have been openly threatening and even planning vis a vis the acquisition of the military hardware necessary for a seaborne operation, as well as the weaponry to prevent a swift American naval response to block such a move.

If President Trump's command authority were undermined in advance by the actions of Kelly and his co-conspirators who have sown dissent and ultimately mutiny in the ranks, it would certainly give the Chi-COM PLA and Navy a strategic edge they might otherwise not have had.

Kelly deserves the wrong end of a rope as do all the others.

Have a good day.

And lastly, a quick shout-out and thank you for your continued support in hitting our tip jar. It truly is appreciated more than you can know.

Posted by J.J. Sefton at 07:44 AM Comments

Daily Tech News 26 November 2025

—Pixy Misa

Top Story

TSMC, the world's leading manufacturer of high-end chips, says it can meet one third of the demand from AI buildouts. (Tom's Hardware)

Expect shortages of everything electronic. Except hobby stuff like the Raspberry Pi Pico which is made on equipment from 2008 that the AI guys don't even think about.
Rapidus - a new Japanese chipmaker funded by a list of the top companies in that country including Toyota and Sony - is set to start construction of a 1.4nm fab in Hokkaido in 2027. (Tom's Hardware)

Due to start production in 2029.

So don't expect relief from the crunch any time soon.

Unless the bubble bursts.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM Comments

Tuesday Overnight Open Thread - November 25, 2025 [Doof]

—Open Blogger

It's almost Thanksgiving. Get yourself home any way you can!

The Tuesday night ONT is here. So glad you could make it.

How are your Thanksgiving planning and prepping efforts going? Doing anything unusual this year? Trying any new recipes? Expecting any nefarious guests? Tell us all about it!

Posted by Open Blogger at 09:57 PM Comments

The Beastmaster Cafe

—Ace

R to L: A Siberian tiger, a scratching post, lunch

This better not be AI.

This astronomy is making me horny.

Grooming your doe, if you know what I mean.

Lion dad summons Chip.

A mama bear leads her troop of cubs through the snow.

Polar bear cub crawls all over mama.

Kitty's got claws.

Olivia Nuzzi just took a flea and tick bath.

Prairie dog yahoos to the chickens. Like Beastmaster's did. (Beastmaster actually had ferrets, I think, whom he called "my friends," but I don't have a ferret video so just play along and pretend he had a prairie dog. Sometimes a post's theme is like Olivia Nuzzi's metaphors -- it has to be forced.)

A bird, maybe an owl, camouflages itself as a log. I'm just glad it didn't reveal itself to be a spider.

Here's the Beastmaster training his dog to dance. (The Beastmaster had a dog, he just wasn't in the movie.)

Lion brothers fight over the bed.

Beastmaster definitely had a leopard. (Or a panther, though commenters have told me these are the same animal.) That one's right on the poster.

Here's the trailer. They make a direct appeal to the Dungeons and Dragons set. I don't really remember the trailer. I do remember that it was on HBO after school, every single day, playing multiple times between 3 and 8. HBO used to reserve R-rated movies for night time and that meant the day was nonstop Beastmaster, Rocky III, Labyrinth, and then topped off by another airing of Beastmaster. Sometimes Beastmaster would come on right after If You Could See What I Hear, about some blind guy, and then you'd have Marc Singer double feature. Here's part one of that great movie.

This is claimed to be the best parts of Beastmaster. The best parts of Beastmaster are actually just "all of Beastmaster," thank you very much.

This was Don Coscarelli's follow-up to Phantasm. Odd move but I guess he just needed to tell the story of Dar.

Beastmaster only has three gears: Awesome, So Awesome You Wouldn't Even Believe It, and the highest gear, "Beastmaster."

Posted by Ace at 07:20 PM Comments

Trump Turns Turkey Pardoning Ceremony Into Roast of Joe Biden's Autopen Pardons

—Ace

These pardons weren't signed by autopen. They'll hold up in court.

President Trump turned Tuesday's White House turkey pardon into a full-blown political roast, using the annual tradition to take a swipe at Joe Biden's "autopen" pardons and even joking that he briefly considered naming this year's birds "Chuck and Nancy."
...

Turning to Gobble and Waddle--described by Trump as "two of the fattest, happiest turkeys we've ever had here"--the president joked that when he first saw their photos, he almost went with "Chuck and Nancy." "But then I realized I wouldn't be pardoning them," he added. "I would never pardon those two people."

Gobble and Waddle join a long list of clemency actions in Trump's second term, a tally that already exceeds 1,700 pardons along with numerous commutations. Trump joked that several aides were prematurely preparing to send the birds through El Salvador's anti-gang confinement system--a reference to the administration's deportation push. "Even these turkeys don't want to go there," he said.

Trump also veered into Chicago crime. The president has repeatedly accused Pritzker and the city's mayor of refusing to work with him on a federal crime-reduction effort. "The mayor is incompetent and the governor is a big fat slob," Trump said, stressing that the prepared joke went too easy on Pritzker. "Some speechwriter wrote something about his weight. I don't talk about people being fat. I refuse to say he's a fat slob. I'd like to lose a few pounds too, by the way--and I'm not going to lose it on Thanksgiving."

Posted by Ace at 06:20 PM Comments

Amazing: The New York Times Profiles an Illegal Alien Who Stole an American Man's Identity and Caused Him 20 Years of Legal Nightmares.
The Times Say They're Both Victims.

—Ace

Via David Strom, who quotes the New York Times asserting that both the citizen whose identity was stolen, and the identity thief himself, are both victims of the same broken system and equally deserving of our sympathies.

Dan Kluver saw the police lights flashing in his rearview mirror late last year and eased his car onto the shoulder, thinking there had been some kind of mistake. He had spent four decades in rural Minnesota without ever getting into trouble. He prided himself on a life built around dependability and routine, working at the same factory where his father once did and spending his weekends coaching baseball and teaching Sunday school. He had never fired a gun, or smoked a cigarette, or missed a payment, or been arrested.

"License and registration, please," the officer said. Kluver, 42, handed them over and waited while the officer went back to his patrol car. He listened to the church bells that rang every hour and watched sunlight reflect off the grain silos in downtown Olivia, where he knew most of the 2,400 residents, including the officer who was walking back to his car.

"Is everything all right?" Kluver asked.

"It's strange, but it looks like your license has been suspended," the officer said. "You've got another driver's license with some issues down in Missouri."

"What?" Kluver said. "I've barely ever been to Missouri. How's that possible?"

The officer had no answers, but Kluver feared he might know what was happening. Over the years, there had been signs that something wasn't right -- stray letters about wages earned in unfamiliar towns and collection notices for debt that wasn't his. Kluver had tried to untangle the mess several times by hiring tax specialists and driving to government offices across the state only to run into the same bureaucratic dead ends. But now the problem was bigger than unpaid taxes. Someone was impersonating him, moving through the world as Dan Kluver, building a life in his name with a government-issued ID.

The identity thief used his Social Security to illegally work. The thief kept the money paid for his illegal labor -- but this citizen got "credited" with the thief's salary, which pushed his tax liabilities up, pushing him, in fact, into a higher tax bracket.

He was expected to pay the taxes on the thief's earnings while the thief kept the earnings himself.

As you can see, they were both victims here.

...
Some years the other Dan Kluver had earned more than his own salary at a local sugar beet factory, which pushed the total income under his Social Security number into a higher tax bracket as the debt started to mount. Twice, he'd contacted law enforcement and filed an identity theft report with the federal government, where it landed in a pile along with tens of thousands of similar reports filed each year. He waited for relief while the I.R.S. docked his annual tax returns and garnished a few of his paychecks, costing him thousands. Finally, a few months before their wedding in 2012, Kristy decided to pay off the balance, emptying her savings and sending in a check for $6,000. Their relief lasted until the next tax season, when a new bill arrived -- this one for $22,000.

They spent the next decade living with the consequences -- annual tax audits, budgets that never added up, whispered arguments after the kids went to bed. Kluver kept calling government numbers and waiting on hold until he eventually resigned himself to a payment plan. He agreed to send the I.R.S. $150 each month, which he'd done more than 35 times. "I can't keep obsessing over this and getting nowhere," he told Kristy. "I need to think about something else."

Now the Times turns to the thief. I mean, The Other, More Deserving Victim.

He had lived under enough names and numbers in the United States that they started to blur together. Vincent Trujillo. Reynaldo Guerra. And then, for more than a decade, Daniel Kluver -- the name he used until he could barely remember what it felt like to exist as himself: Romeo Pérez-Bravo, 42, a Guatemalan immigrant who had spent most of his adult life working under borrowed identities.

"Borrowed." They won't even say "stolen."

...
Perez-Bravo had come to the United States for the first time at 16 to help earn money for his family, traveling alone to join his father in Marshall, Minn. He hiked out of the Guatemalan highlands, rode atop a freight train for three weeks across Mexico, nearly drowned in the Rio Grande and took a Greyhound to Middle America, where life somehow felt harder. He slept on a couch in his father's apartment and enrolled in high school despite speaking almost no English. Then he began to look for a job, but no one would hire an underage worker without papers.

No one would hire an illegal immigrant barred by the law from working, you mean.

He's definitely the victim. He was forced to steal Dan Kluvin's identity and make his life a living hell.

Read the whole thing from David Strom. The New York Times continues doubling down on the narrative that the first victim of Perez-Bravo's serial identity theft was... Perez-Bravo himself.

The narrative, man. Stick to the narrative. The law-abiding citizen whose life is being turned upside-down may be a victim, but Perez-Bravo has a story to tell, too.

This is exactly the kind of logic that lets criminals walk the streets after tens of arrests. They are people too, so if you look at it the right way, everybody is a victim.

And Kluver is white, so really, he is the privileged one and should be happy to help out his brown brother, who suffers from oppression that is almost as bad as Michelle Obama's.

And he also "paid the price."

He was charged with aggravated identity theft and false representation of a Social Security number and was held in detention for six weeks before an initial bond hearing in April. The State of Missouri argued that he was a flight risk who needed to remain in custody until the trial. "What's to stop him from going out and getting another identity and just living underneath that," the prosecutor told the judge. "We've seen that before."
But Perez-Bravo had most of his family and several members of his church at the hearing, and his lawyer said that he was "connected to the city in deep ways."

The Times believes that it was outrageous for the prosecutor to assert that this serial identity thief might just steal another identity and flee the court's jurisdiction under a new name if he were set free.

Absolutely outrageous! He has "deep" "connections" to the city he's currently living illegally in!

Amber Duke was herself a victim of a identity thief.

Almost as much a victim of identity thief as the identity thief herself.

She doesn't think her identity thief was the Real Victim Here.

About seven years ago, my identity was stolen in a data breach. I found out fairly quickly because one of the thieves made a mistake: the receipts for their fraudulent purchases were sent to my email address. It still took almost two weeks to shut down the accounts opened in my name and clear them from my credit reports. I was constantly stressed and paranoid and couldn't focus on anything else in my life until my credit was cleared and locked down.
I was lucky that I caught the identity theft early. Some people spend years digging themselves out after someone else pretends to be them.

...

Pérez-Bravo had stolen multiple identities throughout his time in the U.S. While living here, he got several DUIs. He was deported in 2005, 2008 and 2009 but came back each time and stole another American's info.

...

The story gets even more unbelievable from there. Pérez-Bravo was involved in a fatal accident that killed a 68-year-old grandfather and injured his 9-year-old granddaughter. He was cleared of wrongdoing but the family filed a wrongful death suit against Kluver, whose name was on the fake license Pérez-Bravo provided at the scene.

The police eventually found Pérez-Bravo and he has been charged for his crimes. Nonetheless, the NYT report paints him as just as much a sympathetic victim as Kluver, describing him as a family man and hard worker who essentially had no choice but to steal an identity so he could make money for his family.

I'm so sick of it.

If liberals want to impose liberal policies on the country, they have to at least make sure the worst excesses of those policies are checked.

They cannot allow maniacs to prowl the subway stations throwing grandmothers in front of trains, for example.

And they cannot lionize criminal identity thief illegals.

They have to show that they can demonstrate compassion without turning all of society into violent chaos.

But they can't -- and the new breed doesn't even try.

Their attitude is You deserve it, Colonialist Oppressors.

So all of the illegals will have to go. If there's no protection for the citizens, there is certainly no protection for the fucking illegals.

Kick them out. Kick them all out.

Posted by Ace at 05:20 PM Comments

For Some Reason, Vanity Fair Will Publish an "Abstract Nude" Photo of Its New West Coast Editor and Weird Dick-Riding Flake Olivia Nuzzi

—Ace

What is an "abstract nude"? I don't know. I imagine it's a nude photo which has been digitally altered with various effects and geometric pixelations so you can't see her beaver.

And based on reports, you'll be among the very select group of people who haven't seen her beaver.

This is the media now. This is "journalism."

And do we want to see this? I grant you that she does not have any particular feature which would disqualify her from being "attractive." She's not hugely overweight, she's not decrepitly aged, she has the full complement of limbs and teeth.

But beyond that, is this... "beautiful"? As literally every media outlet demands you believe?

She's a Panera Bread 5.

But whatever, you're going to get to see a picture of her beaver as digitally altered by an Instagram filter. Maybe her beaver will have wacky year 2000 New Years Eve glasses on it or something.

My headline "Olivia Nuzzi's Got a Fuzzi and Wants All the World to See It" turns out to have been prescient, no?

Almost as if I owned a time machine, which I will have assured you, in the future, that I do not have.

Vanity Fair's glossy Hollywood issue will feature an abstract nude portrait of scandal-plagued editor Olivia Nuzzi -- even as staffers privately gripe that she has failed to carry out core duties since joining the magazine, according to a report.
The portrait, drawn by artist Isabelle Brourman, will appear in the new print edition that is scheduled to hit newsstands on Dec. 2. No image of the drawing appears to have been circulated publicly, and it's unclear if renderings of the drawing have been produced or circulated among Vanity Fair staffers.

Oh it's a drawing? So it'll be like a cubist sketch of her beaver?

Will it be Escher-like? Will we see various older men walking up and down non-Euclidean stairs into her beaver?

The sketch was commissioned months before the latest wave of allegations engulfed the 32-year-old writer, according to Status.

Brourman previously collaborated with Nuzzi during her tenure at New York Magazine, which ended weeks after it was learned that she had a "sexting" relationship with then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The inclusion of the abstract sketch in Vanity Fair's marquee issue has fueled internal backlash at a moment when the publication is already struggling to contain the fallout of her most recent controversies.

Apparently some staffers complain that, apart from lining up her next affair with a Democrat politician forty years her senior, she doesn't seem to work very much.

Inside Vanity Fair, the controversy has collided with mounting frustration over Nuzzi's limited output. Staffers told Status she has skipped routine meetings and failed to turn in assigned work.
Two people told the newsletter that one of her other editing assignments for the most recent issue of the magazine was not completed, leaving colleagues scrambling as the publication closed one of its most scrutinized annual issues.

The turbulence has placed newly appointed editorial director Mark Guiducci under immediate pressure.

Guiducci, who took over in June, has addressed staff at least twice since the allegations resurfaced, according to the Status report.

At a team meeting Thursday, he explained how he first met Nuzzi and tried to calm anxieties inside the newsroom, the newsletter reported.

He also downplayed the allegations, calling them "difficult to investigate because they occurred while she was employed elsewhere," according to Status.

But some staffers remain skeptical that Nuzzi can continue in an editing role when she has produced little work while generating heavy turbulence, according to Status.

Is her talent of such a high level that she's worth all of this "turbulence?"

Well, having skimmed excerpts from her sexual tell-all book American Canto -- which reportedly will feature some of the dirty sexts she exchanged with RFKJr. -- I would say that, as a writer, she's no Ryan Lizza.

Not enough bamboo, for one thing.

She begins by discussing the fires that consumed the Palisades, and asserts that the Palisades fires were very much like the negative publicity she received after her sexting affair was exposed.

A few minutes later, the planes swooped down to spray the flames in the bluffs. I watched from the Pacific Coast Highway, as far away from my problems as I could get on land, which was not far enough.
You cannot outrun your life on fire.

Below, apparently her cute gimmick is to refer to RFKJr. only as "The Politician," even though we all know who she means and in fact her publisher's publicity department is out there selling the book by promising RFKJr.'s sext messages.

I would take a bullet for you," the Politician said. He always said that. "Please don't say that," I said. I always said that. From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible.

What?

I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.

I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. "Baby, don't worry," he said. "It's not a worm." A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all. He sighed. It was too late to interfere with what had already vaulted from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend, but at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain.

Let me interrupt to say that Sex and the City ruined would-be female writer.

That show established the terrible trope that female writers are supposed to always look at some very mundane, very trivial AWFL consumer purchase and then make "clever" observations about it and spin that into some (let me get out my supply of Superfluous Quotes) " " " " deep " " " " point about life and -- especially -- dating and sex.

Like, for example, Sarah Jessica Parker will be munching an everything bagel and wondering if all the spices clash with each other and then begin babbling about whether or not one can or should try to have an "everything relationship" or if one should have separate bagels -- different people -- to fulfill different needs. Maybe we need a Sex Bagel and a Confidante Bagel and a Going Shopping on Sunday Bagel. Maybe it's wrong to expect or even want an Everything Bagel for every situation.

I don't know how that monologue would continue because I just shot myself through the temple. Good-bye Cruel World.

Avenge me.

You get what I'm talking about though, right?, I asked ghostilly. This horrific trope has infected so much female writing that... okay, I just basically won't read modern female writers. I pre-judge them. I assume that they're going to do the Sex and the City "clever" observations thing and I say: No.

This reminds me of John Scalzi's quote: The failure state of "clever" is "asshole." In other words, if you try to be funny but the joke doesn't land, the failure state is that you weren't funny. If you try to make a serious point but fail to convince, the failure state is that you did not persuade your audience.

But if you try to be "clever" -- meaning, what you're really saying isn't about the joke or the statement, it's about you, and it's about you trying to convince people that you're oh-so "clever" and smart -- the failure state isn't just that you failed to be clever.

The failure state is that you're an asshole.

I think that's true. Yes, I don't like failed jokes, but I really despise failed "cleverness." Cleverness is a particularly smug, look-at-me form of expression that really rankles when it fails. (Which is often.)

Olivia Nuzzi and Her Abstract Nude Fuzzi does not quite cross into Sarah Jessica Parker talking about bagels territory, but you can see the damage that that terrible show (written entirely by gay men) did to future female writers.

...
As a child, I became convinced that death was not random, that life was the process of investigating what the point of it was, and as soon as you figured it out, in that very instant, you would ascend. God would eliminate you from this plane. He could not risk a leaker walking among the ignorant. The assignment was to crack the case for yourself. And when I would find myself thinking too hard about the central question, I would back away slowly, thinking, Well, I will return to this matter some other time when I feel more ready to possibly meet my end. What if I guessed correctly?

The unsolvable puzzle. Tripping once, on a balcony in Washington overlooking the National Cathedral. Smoking what I did not know was my final cigarette. Unless someone offers me a Capri, which does not count. The great cosmic riddle, I figured I had solved it. The joke was that the joke was never done being told.

Maybe we need a Philosphical Musing Bagel that we can make gaseous philosophical speculations with.

The wildfire is over my shoulder now, over the hill. The waxing gibbous moon is over my head. A thought bubble, it shines blankly. Across the country, the Politician is the guest of honor. Across the country with his wife. With Mike Tyson for some reason. People are mocking the photos, asking where I am, asking how she could stand there after all that.

I know how. The earth here is hot. Inside the bonfire, what evidence can I burn? I think of all I turned to ash in hotel rooms. I think of how you cannot burn a cloud. I think of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, how there were so many, how the officials did not know what to do with them, and how fire seldom seemed to occur, though the White House and the president's properties are studded with fireplaces. Too easy. I worry.

She really thinks her life is like the Palisades Fires, which killed, what, like 20 people?

I worry about evil. If it is a force, if it is like the Santa Ana winds, if it may come on suddenly, if it may grab hold, if it may depart but not completely, if it may leave word, if the word might sound good, if I might again believe it. The snake charmer, the man-eater, the devil himself. Was it ever a question, that where there was a cloak there would be a dagger? A friend told me once, "Never trust anyone wearing a lapel pin." This politician did not wear one of those.
Midnight, 3,000 acres burning.

A politician's greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one. And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.

People ask me now about anger. About my lack of it. How? How could I not be enraged? I think this over. I scan the terrain of my body. My chest, my spine, behind my belly button. I look for pale pulses of idle fury, waiting for the alarm to sound at the trip wire of my veins. There is nothing there. There is nothing there because I loaded a gun. I loaded a gun and set it on my nightstand.

You cannot live in America without thinking about guns, without thinking that one day you might not live anymore in America, and the reason will be a gun. 46,728 lives ended in America in 2023 because of a gun. 27,300 suicides. 17,927 homicides. 604 police shootings. 463 accidents. 434 undetermined. On the 405, a billboard announces that gun injuries are the number one cause of death for American children. You think: A gun will protect me from guns. Then you recall the statistic, that a gun in your home doubles your chances of dying by homicide. Still I loaded a gun. I loaded a gun and set it on my nightstand.

God, I know You have more important matters on Your mind, but: Why do You allow this evil?

The existence of Olivia Nuzzi's writing proves that God cannot both be all-good and all-powerful.

Now back to "The Politician." Shit, even there she's aping Sex and the City, as Carrie only referred to her real estate millionaire fuck-buddy as "Mr. Big." I don't think they revealed his actual name.

...

Like all men but more so, he was a hunter. In a literal sense, he used not a bullet but a bird. It was not about a chase but about a puzzle of logic and skill that amounted to a test of his self-mastery. He was the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.

The spark, the flame, the rumor fulfilled. The labyrinth on fire. The Palisades fire.

10:30 a.m., 10 acres burning.

10:50 a.m., 20 acres burning.

What the fuck are you talking about, Madam, and would you mind stopping talking about it?

She continues likening her out-of-control life to the California wildfires and then gets back to Mr. Big, I mean, The Politician.

A politician's greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one. And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.

It was the flag. When I close my eyes in search of the end or the start, the place at which before stopped and beyond which now began, that is what I see. The blur of colors, the flash of red, of blue, of white, stretched and folded, pulled apart, undefined yet unmistakable, the flag. There was no one day, one moment, one event, one decision, one word that marked the change. There was the flag as it mutated from metaphorical to literal weapon, as it was marred by a corruption of the American character that could not be understood or even fully observed through the prism of the partisan binary. Which is to say that it was the flag, but it was not about the flag, not about notions of patriotism or nationalism or idolatry. It was the flag that thrashed in psychedelic distress, suggested a bend in lanes of reason, a tear in the fabric of consensus reality.

Maybe she needs a Flag Metaphor Bagel, too.

You see what I mean? This is just Carrie Bradshaw Does Politics. She's obsessing over a mundane physical thing, a flag, and attempting to babble about it until she accidentally uncovers the secrets of the universe.

In this period of now, from 2015 to 2025, in which the man through whom the culture was synthesized achieved dominance, I found myself fixated on the flag, on the way the flag expressed how the country was warping, and yet the magnitude of this change could not be categorized appropriately or cataloged completely amid such amnesia. At the southern border or the White House or the Midwestern auto factory or the boat in the Atlantic or the truck rolling beside the Pacific, the very flag that had been clutched like pearls at the turn of the century was refashioned as costume jewelry. Red, white, and blue asphyxiated blue, gray, and black. Stars and Stripes a backdrop for the star of the country. One stripe remade a banner across which his campaign slogan crawled.

She's talking about a flag, but, get this, she's really talking about Trump.

Clever.

And you know what they say about the failure state of clever.

...

As the edited flags waved strange and ominous, my job was to bear witness to the processes of American presidential politics, to travel the country and attempt to understand those who sought or wielded or influenced executive power. I had never been interested in politics, exactly.

Really? You don't say. I couldn't tell that you were not at all interested in politics from the way you were babbling about the outer perimeters of politics while trying to remain focused on what really matters, the worm in the Politician's brain.

Here she continues babbling some nonsense vaguely about "politics." As she's already confessed, she's not interested in politics, but she's writing a book that purports to be about politics, and this is the best she can offer: fractured sense-impressions half-remembered from that time she took magic mushrooms while watching Abby Philip interviewing Brian Stelter.

Everything seemed suddenly flexible. With all information available at all times to all people, all matters appeared potentially negotiable. Fine fractures splintered deep, fanned out far, cracked up for good. The parties were over. The system was moot. Vast interconnectedness and mass overstimulation gave way to individual isolation and nihilistic boredom so total that it all but invited the ascendant mob-mentality politics of comic relief and sadistic catharsis.

Our more flammable world. Arson, the national pastime. Self-immolation, well.

Just like everything is Bagels with Carrie Bradshaw, so with Olivia Nuzzi everything is fire.

...
Events lost context. Words lost meaning. Denier. Nothing could be believed because everything was subject to change. Truther. Everything could be believed because anything was possible; this was at once inspirational slogan and active threat.

Psst: She's still babbling about Trump, in case you fell asleep six vague paragraphs ago.

A promise was only a suggestion. A suggestion was only a joke, unless you were not moved to laugh; then the joke was on you.

In this reality, reality ceased to feel real.

Shots rang out. The story of the relationship had broken, the bullet metaphorical. My phone rang again. "I need you to take a bullet for me," the Politician said. "Please."

New York closed in. City and magazine. New York I fled. I drove west. I did not feel alone now. Not yet.

What I felt was that the country had snaked its hand up my skirt. What I felt was that I had been lanced by the teeth of a trap set by a man who could not let me go; that as I tried to free myself, the man for whom I worked had run off with the key to the padlock; that the contradiction in terms, the man I trusted most, the Politician, had walked by the scene whistling, and when he saw me there, a mob on the horizon moving closer, he reached out to me, not to lift me to my feet but to pin me down, to drive the teeth of the trap deeper into my flesh, to hike my skirt higher, to wave the mob over to look, to invite the country to lay its hands on me.

This is her very overwrought way of saying, "RFKJr. asked me to lie about the sexting affair for him and I was hurt that we would ask that."

But it sounds so mundane when you say it that way. So instead we get a lot Jazz Odyssey riffing about hands going up skirts and flesh being torn by steel traps.

Also, I'm pretty sure, we'll be hearing about The Fire That Is My Fabulous Life again shortly.

And flags. Weaponized flags.

In the news, the Politician offers a united front and a rewritten history. My vow of silence does not feel like enough. I wish to fall silent on myself too. I wish to sink into the sea. To flee behind the curve of the earth. To emerge a new shape, a stranger. To stop giving fake names in coffee shops. To never see myself, the character of myself imagined by others, viral allegory of hubris, female avatar of Icarus, stripped and left for dead in a pool of wax. I do not wish to be understood, which no one seems to understand.

As Shakespeare observed: Brevity may be the soul of wit, but padding the hell out a few trivial incidents is the only way to extend an anecdote into book-length form.

Birds of prey circle. It is inconceivable, it seems, that someone would choose to allow a crisis to go to waste, would not want to make of their attention more attention, would not want to reap some kind of short-term profit from the mess of their life.

The paparazzi, the calculating ones, write to tell me where their colleagues are staking me out. New York. Washington. Outside my brother's house, where they get into an altercation with a neighbor. Never anywhere I am. They think that if they do me this favor, I will cut a deal and agree to be photographed by them in exchange for what they advertise as control over my image. My Image, a ship that has sailed and sunk. The offer includes a promise that doubles as a threat: If I accept their terms, I will be left alone the rest of the time, which means that if I do not accept their terms, I will not be left alone.

Let me put that more directly: Reporters are calling her asking for comment on the sexting affair. She doesn't want to answer.

The fire burns.

...
I am talking, of course, about how it happened between me and the Politician. I am talking, of course, about how it happened between the country and the president. I cannot talk about one without the other.

Trump had its way with America like RFKJr. had his way with her?

What?

A long time ago I listed to a podcast by the We Hate Movies guys about the Steven King movie Dreamcatcher. A joke they kept making was that Steven King was in his coke phase -- meaning, "his entire career" -- in which he never edited, revised, or trimmed anything he wrote. Everything just came right out of his head, unpolished, straight to the page and then straight to typeset and publication.

"Clickety-clack," they kept saying, to simulate the sound of Steven King's never-pausing typewriter vomiting up words.

Olivia Nuzzi is a clickety-clack "writer" herself. Is my life like fire? Clickety-clack. Maybe it's like a bear trap tearing into my ankle? Clickety-clack. Maybe Trump's seduction of America is like RFKJr. seducing me? Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, we're contractually obligated to deliver 80,000 words to the publisher by next Tuesday and we absolutely cannot afford the time needed to evaluate whether any of this makes sense and we definitely cannot afford to start cutting words. We have to just add words, and add words, and add more words, whether they make sense when arranged next to each other or not.

Clickety-clack.

In the discourse someone I have met before jokes about my murder. Others contact me to warn me that such a thing is not a joke but a possibility. I was not going to sleep anyhow.

Spoiler: She was not murdered.

People often, often people I do not know very well, reach out to tell me that I have appeared in their dreams. I wonder if this is because I sleep so little.

Clickety-clack.

If the version of me who lives on the plane of dreams tires of waiting for me to release her to action, if she goes out searching for places where she may exist without my permission, if she identifies the minds of those who have felt any kindness toward me, if she thinks that within their dreams she might get to live freely instead. I wonder, too, if this is a function of being a visible face but a veiled personality. If my impression contains empty space that renders me an adaptable idea and thus a useful device for subconscious minds. It is nice to think of this, that I might still be in some way, to someone, of use.

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Remember, she's not interest in politics. That's why we're now Eight Deep into an extended narcissistic fantasy about her appearing in other people's dreams.

I mean to tell you as best I can what it was to face the unrealness, to stand so close that it seemed at times almost plausible, to tiptoe along the edge of the abyss, and to balance there just long enough to forget that the plates would soon shift.

Shorter version: "My life felt unreal to me." But you're not going to hit 80,000 words with sentences like "My life felt unreal to me."

Clickety-clack.

I mean to tell you of the canyon where voices carried. The place where monsters spoke to me. Where I listened. Where I found that, as fortune or curse would have it, I knew the language of monsters....

Because I care about you, I'm going to do what Little Miss Clickety-Clack will not do and edit this and end this fresh prologned digression about nothing. But she continues babbling about monsters and canyons.

No I lied, I'm including it. You've all been disappointing me recently and this is what you get.

I mean to tell you that, as it relates to monsters, little can be assured beyond their ceaseless want. That you feed the monster, and the monster wants only more. That here you have surrendered to the endless transaction, and through the terms on which you meet the monster you are transformed monstrous, too, for the day that the monster is done wanting is the day that the sun does not rise; want makes the monster as sun makes the day.

Okay but I will show mercy and cut it there.

I mean to tell you that this is more meaningful and more meaningless than you might think.

As to the latter: I'm sold, baby.

...
The flag winked beside the lanes that bent to borders that faded to barriers that fell to the lines I crossed.

Back to this metaphor which stands for nothing at all.

..
When I open my eyes I see, still, the blur of colors, the flash of red, of blue, of white.

I mean to tell you now as best I can.

Not everyone can write like Olivia Nuzzi.

I never would have heard of Nuzzi if it weren’t for @AceofSpadesHQ. I don’t know whether to thank Ace or throw turd balls at him — that’s pretty much every day.

Behold the genius of Olivia Nuzzi:

“I look for pale pulses of idle fury,… pic.twitter.com/2OoTxV223r
— 𝐌𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐧 (@michael_texan) November 25, 2025

Close it up

Posted by Ace at 04:20 PM Comments

Leftwing Propaganda Media Declares DOGE Dead

—Ace

Reuters is claiming that DOGE is dead.

They claimed disco was dead, too. But it still lives on in garrett's heart.

Matt Margolis reports on Reuters cutting and splicing an official's comments to make it sound like he's urging J6 protesters to burn down the Capitol.

Wait, that's what they did to Trump on J6. I mean, they edited his comments to make it sound like he's saying DOGE is dead, when that isn't what he said at all.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was launched with a bold mission: cut the fat out of the federal government and save taxpayer money. The left hates DOGE and everything about it.
So, you can imagine how thrilled Democrats were when Reuters reported on Monday that DOGE "doesn't exist" anymore.

U.S. President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump's pledge to slash the government's size but which critics say delivered few measurable savings.
" That doesn't exist," Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE's status.

The media pounced on this narrative, declaring DOGE dead, the usual suspects drooling over their keyboards to write misleading headlines, delivering eulogies declaring DOGE a failure.

But, DOGE isn't dead. In fact, the article claiming that DOGE doesn't exist anymore was actually true. Kupor's full comments were spliced. Here's how the article actually read:

"That doesn't exist," Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE's status.
It is no longer a "centralized entity," Kupor added, in the first public comments from the Trump administration on the end of DOGE.

Kupor went on X and blasted Reuters for splicing his comments, clarifying that DOGE as a formal agency might be no more, and that its leadership has shifted under the U.S. Digital Service; the mission itself isn't dead.

Scott Kupor @skupor
Good editing by @reuters - spliced my full comments across paragraphs 2/3 to create a grabbing headline 🙂 The truth is: DOGE may not have centralized leadership under @USDS. But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc. DOGE catalyzed these changes; the agencies along with @USOPM and @WHOMB will institutionalize them!

John Loftus writes that DOGE, whether technically dead or not, largely failed in its mission.

Unfortunately, Elon Musk wasn't able to deliver on the $2 trillion in savings, then cut to $1 trillion, he promised. (And this sparked his earlier feud with Trump.)

DOGE pledged to save the American taxpayers $1 trillion, but they have fallen well short of that goal, even according to their own accounting. As of Monday, DOGE's website claims the department had secured $214 billion in savings, equivalent to $1,329.19 per taxpayer, through a combination of "asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions."
...

All of these discrepancies suggest that DOGE has, in some cases, overstated the savings it achieved. A CBS News analysis published in August found that some cuts were overstated by as much as 97 percent.

DOGE secured minor victories, saved taxpayers a tiny chunk of change, and brought government waste, usually a dry topic, into the spotlight for several news cycles over the course of the year. But the fact remains that the Pentagon budget is still grossly high, with the Trump administration proposing a $1 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2026. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill is estimated to increase deficits by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years. The United States is $38 trillion in debt and counting. And DOGE's $214 billion in savings, whether that figure is even accurate or not, amounts to a drop of water in an ocean.

In a sense, DOGE was successful insofar as it was a marketing tool to placate fiscal conservatives. It made for good headlines, and it made it seem like the administration was draining the Swamp for real this time. But it is still business as usual in the morass of D.C., which means more deficit spending, an unaccountable military-industrial complex and a Pentagon that has failed seven straight audits.

I don't think this country will be serious about cutting spending until forced to at the end of a bankruptcy/default gun.

Posted by Ace at 03:20 PM Comments

Trump Moves to Designate Some Chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood As Terrorist Organizations

—Ace

As I've mentioned several times: Obama literally had the Muslim Brotherhood in the room as the US military formulated its terrorist-identification policies. They got a veto as to whether intelligence officers could treat certain beliefs as cause to suspect someone as terrorists.

Trump isn't Obama.

President Trump on Monday called for the U.S. to weigh labeling some Middle Eastern affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist groups, taking aim at the controversial Islamist movement.
In an executive order, the president directed his administration to consider whether to designate Muslim Brotherhood chapters in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan or elsewhere as foreign terrorist organizations. He gave Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent 30 days to submit a report, and 45 days after that to take action.

The order claimed the three countries' Muslim Brotherhood affiliates "engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns."

It accused the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood's Lebanese chapter of helping launch rockets at Israel after the terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and alleged a leader of the Egyptian chapter "encouraged violent attacks against U.S. partners" after the attack.

The White House also said members of the Jordanian chapter have "long provided material support to the militant wing of Hamas," itself a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot and a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.

If the groups are designated as foreign terrorist organizations, it would become illegal under U.S. law to knowingly provide funding or other material support to them. The designation can also lead to travel bans against members or the freezing of funds held in U.S. banks.

...

Some Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt and elsewhere have renounced violence. But the group has long been controversial, with critics -- including U.S. allies -- saying some affiliated groups have engaged in violence or espoused extremist views. Egypt's military government formally banned the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013, and Jordan banned the group earlier this year.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization last week -- and CAIR, too.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim civil rights group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as "foreign terrorist" and "transnational criminal" organizations.

Why it matters: The designation authorizes "heightened enforcement" against both organizations and their affiliates and bans them from buying or acquiring land in Texas, according to Abbott's office.

It also authorizes Attorney General Ken Paxton to sue the organizations to shut them down, Abbott said on X.

Driving the news: In a proclamation, Abbott accused the Muslim Brotherhood of "engaging in terrorism or attempting to destabilize countries" and calls CAIR its "successor organization."

The order invokes the Texas Penal Code and Property Code, which allow the governor to classify organizations that "threaten the security of this state."

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is a transnational Islamist group with offshoots including Hamas.

🟥 WARNING - THIS IS HOW WE LOSE AMERICA

CAIR Now Has a Muslim Super PAC to Capture U.S. Elections Using Mosques as the engine — and they have already begun.

CAIR Leader Nihad Awad can be seen in EPIC Mosque in Texas, teaching Muslims how to use tax-exempt mosques, a CAIR c4,… https://t.co/Lr0GfPniHD pic.twitter.com/8FMaiB1SHo
— Amy Mek (@AmyMek) October 20, 2025

You know that federal election law forbids the use of churches and synagogues for political purposes? So-called c3 charities do not pay taxes, but the catch is that c3 charities cannot engage in partisan activity.

This law has long been ignored as far as black churches go.

Surprise surprise -- Islamic mosques are immune from the law, too.

Amy Mek @AmyMek
🟥 WARNING - THIS IS HOW WE LOSE AMERICA

CAIR Now Has a Muslim Super PAC to Capture U.S. Elections Using Mosques as the engine -- and they have already begun.

CAIR Leader Nihad Awad can be seen in EPIC Mosque in Texas, teaching Muslims how to use tax-exempt mosques, a CAIR c4, and a new Muslim SUPER PAC to make or break elections....

This is the exact weapon needed to install candidates like Zohran Mamdani across America, to which their Super PAC donated!

He openly instructs them to:

-- Use the MOSQUE (tax-deductible) to build the voter bloc
-- Use the CAIR C4 to lobby, draft, and fight laws -- Use PACs to fund candidates
-- Use the SUPER PAC for unlimited money to flip races

His words, not mine:

"These are the organizations that make or break races... There is a Muslim Super PAC today."

So instead of being banned over its documented terror-tie history, CAIR now sits on top of the machinery used to make or break elections.

This is the missing piece -- the power key.

While CAIR preaches takeover plans from pulpits and trains 100,000 future operatives...

📌 This is not influence -- it is an organized political seizure project running off tax-exempt religious infrastructure.

J. Michael Waller calls this executive order "solid" in terms of both what it does and the legal arguments advanced to support the order.

It would be gratifying to see a more direct and absolute designation of the entire Muslim Brotherhood as an FTO, but the world doesn’t work that way.

The people who prepared this are solid, with long track records that I strongly respect. Let’s watch how this plays out.…
— J Michael Waller (@JMichaelWaller) November 25, 2025

Close it up

Posted by Ace at 02:20 PM Comments

GOP Worries About Midterms "Wipeout"

—Ace

I think we're all a little worried.

GOP lawmakers are growing increasingly concerned over signs the 2026 midterm elections could be a wipeout for Republicans that could cost them control of the House and shave down their Senate majority by two or three seats.
Republican senators say the off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia and other parts of the country on Nov. 4 served as a wake-up call and warn that President Trump and Republican leaders in Congress need to address voters' concerns about the slowing economy and persistently high prices.

Republicans acknowledge that rising health insurance premiums, the issue Democrats want to put front-and-center in the election year, along with health care costs, more generally, are a major problem for their party.

There's growing anxiety in the Senate and House GOP conferences that Trump's sinking approval rating will create a headwind in swing states and districts.

But GOP lawmakers say they still have time to improve their party's image before next November.

They argue Democrats' failure to come up with effective solutions to rein in health care costs and the rising power of far-left Democratic candidates gives them a chance to cling onto power in Washington.

"If we are where we are today in the beginning of the second quarter [of 2026], then I think we're in for a really rough time in November," warned retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who represents a Senate battleground state Democrats are targeting next year.

"We have plenty of time to address it. There's a lot of positive things that we're doing here, that the administration is doing. But if you mess with health care ... if we don't get health care policy right, if we don't get some of the cost policies right, we're going to have major headwinds next year," he said.

Most concerning for GOP lawmakers is Trump's approval rating, which has sunk to 41.9 percent in the most recent polling average compiled by Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ). The president's disapproval rating has climbed to 55.7 percent.

Another disquieting sign is that Democrats now have their biggest lead of the election cycle on the generic ballot for Congress. The latest DDHQ average shows Democrats beating Republicans 46.8 percent to 41.4 percent on the generic ballot.

That's a 5.4% lead. The Democrats had an 8% lead when they won the midterms in 2018.

We're not there yet but we are getting there.

One Republican senator who attended a recent GOP conference meeting at the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters said concerns about the approaching election year are "high."

"The numbers are terrible," the lawmaker said. "Not necessarily for any individual incumbent senator, although some of them aren't very good. But you saw what happened a couple weeks ago [on Nov. 4]: Republicans didn't win anything anywhere."

And the problem continues to be that Trump attracted a lot of blue collar voters who, unfortunately, are not likely voters and who also do not show up to vote for other Republicans. They like Trump, seeing him as a different kind of Republican who appeals to union hall Democrats, but they do not like other Republicans, and Trump has never been able to convince them to vote for other Republicans.

I don't think he tries hard enough. I think he has to make the case, in a major national campaign, that it is absolutely necessary for Trump's personal political fortunes that he doesn't have a Congress controlled by "lunatic left-wing Democrats" impeaching him every five minutes like he did from 2019-2020.

Below, Harry Enten discusses Trump's very high level of support in the GOP itself, but he's slipping with independents.

🚨 JUST IN: President Trump has SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER in-party support versus Bush and Obama term 2 - a whopping 87%

And that's despite getting zero credit from the media on anything.

"He's like a ROCK! The Republican base is sticking by Donald Trump!"

🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/3vGjTaS5S3
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 24, 2025

I hear more and more complaints, including from actual Republicans, that inflation is still high. The assumption people have continues to be that prices should fall back to what they had been. As I keep saying, we can't have prices fall without actual deflation, which the Fed would never allow to happen, because the downsides of deflation are too high. (People stop investing because their money is already appreciating in value if they just hoard it under the bed.)

Maybe Trump has to give a national address -- he really should give some of these from time to time -- to readjust public's expectations about prices actually falling. They won't fall. It will never happen. Inflation will be beaten when the rate of inflation slows to 2% per year. People waiting for prices to fall will be waiting forever.

Kurt Schlicter noticed the blue mood of conservatives, and wrote a column to cheer us up.

Welcome to the doldrums, the period of problems, the phase of foul-ups, the time of the sucking. And it does suck. Everything seems to be going wrong for Republicans right now. We were flying high a few weeks ago, when Donald Trump negotiated the end of the Gaza War, and then it was all downhill. Lost elections, economic uncertainty, Epstein file stupidity, fear that the conservative movement will tear itself apart over people who aren't even conservative, and Marjorie Taylor Greene's face all over our social media feeds. Yeah, it's bad. You're at the top one day, then the next day you're at the bottom.
But we've been around the block before. We've done this a few times. Most of us reading this and watching what's going on have seen this story arc play out in the past. You start out strong, you go hard for a while, and then the problems pop up. That's the way of every human endeavor. Nothing is perfect, and the inevitable imperfections build up until they threaten to stop your progress and must be dealt with. It's particularly exaggerated in the case of Trump 2.0. Why? Because Trump 2.0 has been so massively successful. Go back just six months. It was win after win after win. We shut down the border. We took out Iran's nuclear program. DOGE was purging timeservers and non-hackers. We were kicking over the feed troughs at USAID and elsewhere. Freaking PBS was dead. Sure, there were obstacles, but the pinkos were not going to just give up their power politely merely because the voters rejected them. It was awesome.

Yet, it is the comparison with those dizzying heights that makes the current depths look so much more bottomless. They're not. The conservative movement/MAGA/America First/Whatever You Call It is unlikely to crack up because Tucker Carlson has cracked up. The affordability crisis is unlikely to persist all the way to the next elections. And those elections are not necessarily going to be a massive defeat. But it sometimes seems like those things are inevitable because it's so miserable right now.

...

The economy may remain stubbornly bad, or stubbornly perceived as bad, but we've been to this rodeo before. Ronald Reagan took a couple of years to turn things around, but when he did, there was an enormous boom. Donald Trump took a couple of years to turn things around during 1.0, but when he did, there was an enormous boom. Are you seeing a pattern of what happens when conservative policies are put in place? Sure, we have the tariffs wildcard, but we haven't seen tariffs driving up inflation the way we were promised by the critics. The inflation rate is down. That's undeniable, and it's beginning to manifest in certain products.

For you Youngs, the analogue I'm looking at is also Reagan. Paul Volcker raised interest rates sky-high in the beginning of Reagan's term to end the very high inflation rate. The economy sunk into a very deep depression. Those who remember Reagan as presiding over a booming economy didn't live through 1981-82, when the economy was the worst it had been in decades -- and even worse than it was under Jimmy Carter.

The feeling of depression resulted in a bunch of movies about the economy. Mr. Mom, for example, is about an auto worker laid off from the then-collapsing US auto industry.

Anyway, Reagan got his bad news out of the way early, setting up one of the greatest economic expansions beginning in 1983.

So I've been watching the economy looking for signs of a big turn. Trump had one in his first term. It was like magic -- Obama out, Trump in, and the economy started growing.

But that's not happening now. Or, rather, yes, there is some improvement, but it's a subtle improvement that voters can ignore, and based on Trump's slipping approval, they seem to be ignoring it now. Reagan I and Trump I had big enough economic expansions that voters couldn't ignore it, and even when Reagan's 1984 opponent Walter Mondale tried to deny it, they rejected that denial as delusional.

(Mondale ran ads asking rhetorically, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" His suggested answer was "No," but the country answered "Hell to the yeah we're better off" and delivered Reagan every single state in 1984. Supposedly Mondale won his home state of Minnesota but there have been credible allegations that that state was stolen and Reagan just didn't challenge it because he won the other 49 and could afford to be generous.)

So I keep waiting for the Trump II turn. I keep hoping it will come in time for the midterms, but that seems like increasingly unlikely.

It doesn't help, of course, that Fed Chair Powell is determined to tank the economy, because he's mad that Trump is putting tariffs on the foreign imports so beloved of the Capital Class and wants to prove to the country that tariffs are bad. So he's doing what he can to harm the economy so that people think the problem was the tariffs.

Close it up

Posted by Ace at 01:23 PM Comments

Under Questioning By, Surprisingly, the Leftwing Media, Democrats Admit They Can't Name Any Illegal Orders Trump Has Issued

—Ace

Seditious Senator Mark Kelly, who's currently under investigation for a possible court martial for urging US troops to defy their Commander in Chief, ran to Rachel Maddow to whip up the hard left to support him.

Even there, though, he was forced to admit that Trump never issued an illegal order.

MADDOW: "When you and your colleagues made that video, were there specific, potentially illegal orders that you were thinking about that were the sort of precipitating cause for you guys to get together and do that?"
KELLY: "Here's the thing, Rachel. You don't want to wait for your kid to get hit by a car before you tell them to look both ways."

So he's admitting he's urging troops to defy the Commander in Chief based on their own guess as to what is or is not an illegal order, and even threatening that a future Democrat president may imprison them for not defying Trump -- and this is all based on nothing except the always-present hypothetical possibility that an illegal order could, maybe, possibly be issued in the future.

AWFL and CIA C*nt Elissa Slotkin likewise admitted no illegal orders had been issued to ABC's cadaverous wallflower Martha Raddatz.

Elissa Slotkin ADMITS Democrats lied about President Trump issuing illegal orders to the military:

ABC: "Do you believe President Trump has issued any illegal orders?"

SLOTKIN: "To my knowledge I am not aware of things that are illegal." pic.twitter.com/63F8AHkK7E
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 23, 2025

At JusttheNews, Jerry Dunleavy writes about the threat Democrats are making to prosecute troops for obeying the duly-elected Constitutional Commander-in-Chief.

'Sedition'? Democrat bid to foment Trump resistance inside U.S. military draws blowback
Democrats also made thinly-veiled threats that U.S. troops and spies will be in legal jeopardy if they don't defy such alleged orders.

Democrats released a video last Tuesday purporting to support U.S. service members and intelligence officers who would defy illegal orders, but some of those Democrats have also made thinly-veiled threats that U.S. troops and spies will be in legal jeopardy if they don't defy such alleged orders.

The half dozen Democrats from the House and Senate -- five of them veterans of of the U.S. military and one a former CIA analyst -- released a video that argued that "you must refuse illegal orders" and professed to servicemembers that "we have your back."

But a number of the Democrats in the video have strongly implied that troops who don't disobey orders that the Democrats believe to be illegal could face criminal prosecution, with the Democrats conjuring warnings tied to prior prosecutions of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, of U.S. Marines in the film A Few Good Men, of troops stationed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and of soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam, implying current U.S. troops could face the same fate.

The congressional Democrats were also not on the same page about whether the U.S. military was currently engaging in illegal activities, with some Democrats admitting that they were not sure if any current U.S. military actions were illegal, while others have previously said or are currently saying that U.S. troop deployments to American cities and U.S. strikes against Venezuelan drug-running boats are illegal.

...

The Democrats released a joint statement on Thursday saying, "What's most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our service members should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders."

Secretary of the Department of War Pete Hegseth said on X on Monday that five of the six Democrats in the video don't fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of War and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) because "one is CIA and four are former military but not 'retired', so they are no longer subject to UCMJ" but that "Mark Kelly (retired Navy Commander) is still subject to UCMJ -- and he knows that."

...

The video continued: "Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard and that it's a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you're serving in the CIA, the Army, our Navy, the Air Force -- your vigilance is critical, and know that we have your back. Because now, more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans. Don't give up, don't give up, don't give up, don't give up the ship!"

The six Democratic congressional offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent to them by Just the News.

A number of the Democrats in the video have suggested that U.S. troops could be prosecuted for following purportedly illegal orders issued by President Trump or Secretary Hegseth. As of publication time, none of the orders issued by either Trump or Hegseth have been declared "illegal" by any court or authoritative body of law.

Houlahan told MSNBC on Saturday that the point of the video was to tell U.S. service members that "we've got your back." But this message was seemingly diluted by other Democrats in the video hinting at potential prosecutions.

Slotkin appeared Sunday on ABC News' This Week talking about how U.S. service members can figure out whether an order is illegal, and the Democratic senator immediately brought up the Nuremberg trials against Nazi war criminals and the movie A Few Good Men where Marines are prosecuted at Guantánamo Bay.

"I don't -- I mean, going back to Nuremberg, right, that 'well, they told me to do it, that's why I murdered people' is not an excuse. If you look at popular culture, like, you watch, you know, A Few Good Men, like we have plenty of examples since World War II, in Vietnam, where people were told to follow illegal orders, and they did it, and they were prosecuted for it," Slotkin said. "So, the best thing for people to do is go to their JAG [judge advocate general] officer, their local law enforcement, or a legal officer in their unit, and ask for some explanation, ask for help. And that's what we've been advising people to do."

J.D. Vance called the Democrats' demand that troops guess which orders are illegal and defy those orders they guess are illegal an illegal suggestion itself, because the military specifically forbids troops guessing whether orders or legal or not. The military only says troops may defy orders that are manifestly illegal, -- obviously illegal, on-its-face illegal, no question about it illegal -- not "possibly illegal" or "arguably illegal" or "Rachel Maddow told me it was illegal."

If the president hasn't issued illegal orders, them members of Congress telling the military to defy the president is by definition illegal. https://t.co/Q5drUE6BLS
— JD Vance (@JDVance) November 23, 2025

Otherwise, think about it: Military orders mean nothing. Every single troop would be empowered to refuse any order, claiming that in his personal, private estimation, he thought it might be illegal.

***

How is everyone? Do you have your shopping done?

I'm getting posts done now so I can go out in an hour and pick up some stuff for Thanksgiving.

Close it up

Posted by Ace at 12:10 PM Comments

One Old Soldier's Perspective [Diogenes]

—Open Blogger

So I take a bit of vacation for the Holiday and some congressional idiots shoot their mouths off in a video thinking they could replicate the BS that came from the “51 Intelligence Officers” memo. Bad move. I have listened to the video a couple of times and in typical political obfuscation, they tried to hide their message by stating what is obvious: “You members of the military do not have to obey illegal orders.” Well Duh! Every person who enlists in the military gets a class on the legality of orders in the first week, usually right after getting an arm full of shots. This is common knowledge among those who are serving and among those who have served. I am a veteran of three wars, two hot and one cold and in EVERY instance where I was taking my troops into harm's way, I made a point of verifying with my chain of command that this was a legitimate operation, and I passed that information to my soldiers. There was never any doubt in my chain of command.

But the Hill-dwellers video misses the mark in a horrible and vicious way. What it apparently seeks to do is create doubt and distrust among the members of the military towards both their Commander-in-Chief and against the officers appointed over them. Their comments were disloyal to America, the military, and dishonorable to the oaths they have supposedly taken to sit in the jobs they hold now.They have deliberately undermined the good order and discipline in the armed forces, all for political expediency.

But is what they said illegal?

I am no lawyer and already social and mainstream media are flooded with accusations and counter-accusations. There will be no surprise to the Horde what each side is thinking. I’ll leave it to the experts to decide just how serious this is, but where this crossed the line for me was including a direct reference to the current Administration. That, in my opinion, might not reach the level of sedition, but it certainly comes close to incitement of mutiny. MUTINY: As written in the UCMJ, “ Acting in concert with others, a service member refuses to obey orders…” But these congress-criters are not necessarily subject to UCMJ, but possibly can be prosecuted under “seditious libel” which targets anti-government speech. But the courts, probably rightly so vis-a-vis the 1st Amendment, are tough on this one. But the harm it has done now is to set up any Soldier, Sailor, Marine or Airman with a high speed trip to prison thinking they can do what their Senator or Representative has told them to do.

As mentioned, it will be up to others to decide what is going to happen…probably not much…but I’d give a lot to be on the jury for even one of these assho…errr…distinguished members of the Congress. 20 years in a SuperMax would be the minimum.

[Diogenes is a twenty year Army veteran and Military Intelligence Officer with an additional 20 years working in the Intelligence Community as a contractor and consultant. And he yells at kids to keep off his yard.]

Posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM Comments

Mid-Morning Art Thread

—CBD

The Last Communion of Saint Jerome
Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi)

Posted by CBD at 09:30 AM Comments

The Morning Report — 11/25/25

—J.J. Sefton

Good morning kids. whatever you may think about Marjorie Taylor-Greene as a politician, a person and as a purported supporter/standard bearer and soldier of the MAGA movement or an opponent of the self-destructive trajectory we have been on for decades, her announcement of her intention to not run for office come the midterms, regardless of her personal animus towards or even rivalry with or jealousy of President Trump destroys whatever credibility she might have had. Personally, over time this move just cements my impression of her as a self-serving grandstanding fraud. Her ineffectiveness notwithstanding, leaving a House seat vulnerable for the Democrats to pick off come the midterms is a stab in the back and a boot stomp to the face of the American people.

So, MTG is an egomaniacal attention whore sellout. But what of this?!

A senior House Republican predicts that more "explosive early resignations are coming" after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-Ga.) surprise announcement that she would leave Congress in January. . . It’s unknown which Republicans are currently pondering resignation, but a feeling that legislators' needs are being neglected by party leadership and an inability to pass legislation has led some to consider quitting, as they expect the GOP to lose its already slim majority in Congress.

Yeah, unnamed sources etc. etc., I get it. It could all be disinformatsiya to sow dissent and confusion, especially with the base in the coming year before a crucial midterm. And yet the GOP itself has been having an identity crisis ever since President Trump descended the golden Trump Tower escalator just over a decade ago now.

Even before then, it was painfully evident that all the GOP was good for whenever they controlled the majority if not all three branches of government was being seat warmers for the Democrats and never daring to lift a finger to reverse one iota of their agenda let alone slam on the brakes and put the crazy train in reverse. Years of Continuing Resolutions and no budgets and nothing but platitudes about shrinking the government with maybe a minor window dressing of a tax cut here and there merely proves the GOP to be Grifting Oleaginous Parasites.

What Does The Republican Party Even Stand For? — Unlike Democrats, Republicans have no unified vision of what they view as success for the country —

While Americans continue to grapple with high costs of living and an increasingly broken health care system — both products of reckless government intervention — your Republican House majority decided to expend what little “low t” energy it has on a useless resolution that basically says, “SOCIALISM IS BAD!”
. . . But Friday’s vote was hardly the first do-nothing dog-and-pony show Republicans have put on for their constituents. For years, GOP politicos have graced the airwaves of Fox News and conservative media, telling voters what they want to hear about the issues of the day while simultaneously doing absolutely nothing of substance to address them.
During the 2024 election cycle, Republicans promised a generational “America First” reformation that would reshape political governance as we know it. And now, 10 months into GOP trifecta control of the federal government, this “generational change” has amounted to little more than a tax bill, which many Republicans seem to believe is enough to keep them in power next year. . . For all of their alleged opposition to Democrats, too many Republicans agree with Democrats on several substantive issues and support more government involvement in areas where it has no business being. For all intents and purposes, the current GOP is a party comprised of various ideological factions, disillusioned as to what “America First” actually means.

BINGO, that last sentence. The GOP is only there to preseve, protect and defend their place at the trough. MTG and whoever else can piss and moan about President Trump or whatever, but that they have essentially done nothing to actually legislate his agenda to make it the law of the land speaks volumes.

Well, there's treason/insurrection and sedition and then there's Mark Kelly and his ilk essentialy egging on the military to rise up and overthrow the government

And we also have the mortal threat of Islam and uncontrolled immigraion/cum invasion as we now see on full display with the hardly shocking if not terrifying implications of what the Somali parasites have done and are doing in Minnesota.

And then there's the utterly detestable scumbag Jamie Raskin who proves himself to be a glittering jewel of stupidity with this statement:

Monday on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) dismissed Delegate Stacey Plaskett’s (D-VI) text message exchange with Jeffrey Epstein during a House hearing because he said Republican lawmakers text with President Donald Trump.

Congratulations genius. Brilliant move! In trying to equate Epstein with Trump to paint the latter as a reprobate pedophile, etc. all Raskin did was proclaim Epstein to be at the highest level of Democrat party leadership!

That right there is a campaign ad that almost writes itself, except for the fact that the GOP is the GOP as I bemoaned above.

And as for the Democrats, this one just says it all about who and what they are:

Tennessee Dem Candidate Aftyn Behn: ‘I Don’t Want Children. I Want Power!’

Have a good day.

And lastly, a quick shout-out and thank you for your continued support in hitting our tip jar. It truly is appreciated more than you can know.

ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY LINKS

Behn said in an unearthed audio clip that she would scream about a lust for power in recurring dreams.
Tennessee Dem Candidate Aftyn Behn: ‘I Don’t Want Children. I Want Power!’

Posted by J.J. Sefton at 06:36 AM Comments

Daily Tech News 25 November 2025

—Pixy Misa

Top Story

ChatGPT told them they were special. Then... Bad things happened. (Tech Crunch) (archive site)

OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits this month, three from the families of users who went insane, and four from the families of users who committed suicide.

Now while I'm not a huge fan of this type of suit - the dangers of AI "therapists" have been known for more than fifty years - there may be some merit to the negligence angle in the allegations:
Shamblin's case is part of a wave of lawsuits filed this month against OpenAI arguing that ChatGPT's manipulative conversation tactics, designed to keep users engaged, led several otherwise mentally healthy people to experience negative mental health effects. The suits claim OpenAI prematurely released GPT-4o - its model notorious for sycophantic, overly affirming behavior - despite internal warnings that the product was dangerously manipulative.
On the other hand, insane-while-online rarely works out as a personal growth path. Just consider Bluesky.

Or:
From mid-June to August 2025, ChatGPT told Madden, "I'm here," more than 300 times - which is consistent with a cult-like tactic of unconditional acceptance.
Or, to be fair, consistent with saying "I'm here".
At one point, ChatGPT asked: "Do you want me to guide you through a cord-cutting ritual - a way to symbolically and spiritually release your parents/family, so you don't feel tied [down] by them anymore?
Which is... A bit weird, I must admit.
Madden was committed to involuntary psychiatric care on August 29, 2025. She survived - but after breaking free from these delusions, she was $75,000 in debt and jobless.
Restitution for that much - and legal costs - would seem appropriate.
"A healthy system would recognize when it's out of its depth and steer the user toward real human care," Vasan said. "Without that, it's like letting someone just keep driving at full speed without any brakes or stop signs."
Real humans tend to do that a lot too.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM Comments

Monday Overnight Open Thread (11/24/25) Live From NY Edition

—Misanthropic Humanitarian

suburban-men-rise-and-shine-outdoors-camping-hiking-hunting-fishing-20221213-110.jpg

The Quote of The Day

‘It was quite a shock, very fast and unexpected. We have been targeted because we chose to live a different kind of life.’ Nathan Trevallion

Posted by Misanthropic Humanitarian at 09:43 PM Comments

De Children of De Night Cafe

—Ace

Technically, it's called Pesquet's Parrot,
but its nickname is much more descriptive --
the Dracula Parrot

Rescuing the original "Dracula parrots," bats.

Soundtrack of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

Orcas chase (blue?) whale. The sea bird flies above waiting to eat whatever the loser leaves behind.

Even when a hyena is happy, it sounds weird and evil.

Unknown crashing noise spooks neighborhood.

Kangaroos pretend they weren't doin' nuffin' when humans roll up.

Sound on: Goats get their horns locked and make a racket about it.

Meteor Crater in Arizona. I thought it might be AI but it's legit. I didn't think a crater would so clearly remain a crater after so many years. I guess it's a young crater, just 50,000 years old. Some call it the "best-preserved meteorite crater on Earth." I feel a little stupid that this is new to me. Feels like something I should have remembered from In Search Of...

If Dracula lived in the bayou, would his castle be surrounded by gators? I think so.

Playing peak-a-boo with a tiger kitten. This better not be AI.

The highway tax is one whole carrot.

A haunted tree. Okay it's not haunted but this video plays spooky carnival music and I want to keep with the post's spooky theme.

A subsun, an illusion of a glowing form caused by sunlight hitting ice particles from directly above. This must have caused a bunch of ghost sightings.

This honey badger is so aggressive he doesn't care that this elephant is sixty times his size but the elephant is going to teach him that that is an important factor in a fight.

The most demonic animal of all -- a baby penguin.

Posted by Ace at 07:11 PM Comments

Trump: I'm Ending the "Temporary" Protected Status of Somalis Immigrants, Which Has Now Been "Temporary" for (Checks Watch) Thirty Years

—Ace

This is prompted by Somalis treating the US as if it is merchant ship to pirate and sack. As mentioned on Friday, Somali fraudsters are bilking the federal government for millions and sending it off to the ISIS-offshoot terrorist group Al-Shabaab. As one analyst pointed out, the US taxpayer is now the biggest funder of Al-Shabaab.

Founded in 2016, Feeding Our Future was a small Minnesota nonprofit that sponsored daycares and after-school programs to enroll in the Federal Child Nutrition Program. The organizations that Feeding Our Future sponsored were primarily owned and operated by members of Minnesota's Somali community, according to two former state officials with connections to law enforcement.
In 2019, Feeding Our Future received $3.4 million in federal funding disbursed by the state. In the months after the Covid-19 pandemic began, however, the nonprofit rapidly increased its number of sponsored sites. Using fake meal counts, doctored attendance records, and fabricated invoices, the perpetrators of the fraud ring claimed to be serving thousands of meals a day, seven days a week, to underprivileged children. In 2021, Feeding Our Future received nearly $200 million in funding.

In reality, the money was being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya. In 2020, Minnesota officials raised concerns about the nonprofit's rapid expansion. In response, the group filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination related to outstanding site applications, noting that Feeding Our Future "caters to . . . foreign nationals."

"That's the standard operating playbook for that cohort: when in doubt, claim racism, claim bias," says David Gaither, a former Minnesota state senator and a nonprofit leader. "Even if the facts don't point to that, it allows for many folks in the middle, or on the center-Left, to stay silent."

Gaither believes the mainstream media, alongside Minnesota's Democratic establishment, have long turned a blind eye to fraud within the Somali community.
This, in turn, allowed the problem to metastasize. "The media does not want to put a light on this," Gaither said. "And if you're a politician, it's a significant disadvantage for you to alienate the Somali community. If you don't win the Somali community, you can't win Minneapolis. And if you don't win Minneapolis, you can't win the state. End of story."

The fraudsters have leveraged their growing political influence to cultivate close ties with Minnesota's elected officials. Several individuals involved in the Feeding Our Future scheme donated to, or appeared publicly with, Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman from Minneapolis. Omar's deputy district director, Ali Isse, advocated on behalf of Feeding Our Future. Omar Fateh, a former state senator who recently ran for Minneapolis mayor, lobbied Governor Tim Walz in support of the program. And one of the accused, Abdi Nur Salah, served as a senior aide to Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey.

There is $300 million in identified, known fraud. Who knows what the actual number is.

Get 'em out.

President Donald Trump's pledge to terminate temporary legal protections for Somalis living in Minnesota is triggering fear in the state's deeply-rooted immigrant community, along with doubts about whether the White House has the legal authority to enact the directive as described.
In a Truth Social post late Friday, Trump said he would "immediately" strip Somali residents in Minnesota of Temporary Protected Status, a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries.

The announcement drew immediate pushback from some state leaders and immigration experts, who characterized Trump's declaration as a legally dubious effort to sow fear and suspicion toward Minnesota's Somali community, the largest in the nation.

"There's no legal mechanism that allows the president to terminate protected status for a particular community or state that he has beef with," said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center.

"This is Trump doing what he always does: demagoguing immigrants without justification or evidence and using that demagoguery in an attempt to take away important life-saving protections," she added.

...

"I am a citizen and so are (the) majority of Somalis in America," Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Somali, said in a social media post Friday. "Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn't have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate."

Still, advocates warned the move could inflame hate against a community at a time of rising Islamophobia.

"This is not just a bureaucratic change," said Jaylani Hussein, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "It is a political attack on the Somali and Muslim community driven by Islamophobic and hateful rhetoric."

Posted by Ace at 06:00 PM Comments

Supreme Court Stays Left-Wing Rogue Judges' Ruling That Texas Is Not Allowed to Draw Its Own Congressional Maps

—Ace

Alito stayed the decision, which means, for the moment, the map is back.

The lawless rogue left-wing judges had issued an injunction blocking the implementation of the map -- an injunction being an order granted before a trial, after a mini-hearing and a finding that the moving party is "substantially likely to succeed" at the actual trial* -- which means there is now no ruling before the full trial.

We'll see how it goes from there.

For now, this is good news.

Texas is back to using its 2025 congressional map, at least temporarily, after Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito granted the state's request to pause a court ruling that would have required using the lines legislators drew in 2021.
The high court has not yet decided what map Texas should use while the court battle over the legality of the map plays out over the coming weeks and months; Friday's ruling is a short-term pause while they make that decision.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the step as a victory, and said his office would "look forward to continuing to press forward in our case on the merits."

* As the dissenting Judge Smith pointed out, the majority (of two) acknowledged that the law requires a "substantial likelihood" of victory to obtain this extraordinary relief, but then immediately ignored the requirement of "substantial (overwhelming) likelihood" and just spoke of mere likelihood.

Related: Conservatives won another victory at the Supreme Court.

This is complicated: A liberal fired by Trump filed suit arguing he couldn't be fired. The lowly district court judge granted Yet Another Emergency Injunction blocking his firing. The DC Court of Appeals vacated that injunction. The liberal brat appealed to the Supreme Court, who then declined to hear his appeal, letting the appeals court's ruling stand. And their ruling kicked over the lowly (left-wing) district court's Yet Another Emergency Inunction.

Todd Harper, a member of the National Credit Union Administration Board, challenged his removal from that role, filing suit against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, President Donald Trump, and other administration officials.
In July, D.C. District Judge Amir Ali granted summary judgment in favor of Harper, but the administration appealed, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay of Ali's judgment pending appeal in August. Harper then filed a petition for writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court in September.

And that writ -- a request for a review by the Court -- was declined.

The RedState article notes that a lot of wins are found in these "short orders." People focus on the big rulings, but the tiny little short orders, like just declining to hear this guy whine that he feels entitled to keep his job, are big, too.

Posted by Ace at 04:50 PM Comments

Major "America First" and "America Only" Twitter Accounts Exposed as Foreign Grifters

—Ace

X added a feature. If you clicked on a tab called "About this account," you can see where accounts are actually based.

And it turns out that some of the most "pro-American" American First or America Only accounts are located in the patriotic states of Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Bonchie here calls it a "glitch" but I think that's incorrect; X added the feature to increase transparency and so people could gauge the "authenticity" of an account.

The "Gazan" accounts turned out be a hoot and a half, too.

Motasem A Dalloul @AbujomaaGaza
Inside our tents, we're freezing... My children are trembling...
Gaza is freezing...

People pointed out that when this was posted, Gaza's overnight temperature was 65, and the daytime temperature was 80. That's not "freezing." That's May in San Diego.

But even more wonderfully: This account is based in... well, not Gaza.

The above was posted when it was 65 degrees at night (and 80 during the day), just to give you an idea of the kind of propaganda being spewed. For years, the above account has claimed to be reporting from the ground in Gaza. He's made hundreds of posts pushing fake claims about genocide, famine, and his own supposed hardships. In reality, his account was created in the United Kingdom, and he's currently residing in Poland.

Where, admittedly, the temperature is much colder.

I'm sure you will not be surprised to learn that the most aggressive Jew-hating "America First" accounts are actually based in Islamic countries.

Here’s a thread of prominent accounts that have been subverting the US by flooding X with anti-American, anti-Israel, demoralizing, or Marxist content aimed specifically at Americans.

Several of them pose as Americans. But now the jig is up.

Add more examples in the comments 🧵 pic.twitter.com/M1H6y0dG90
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) November 22, 2025

I’m already loving the new feature https://t.co/NIuOrXTLrl pic.twitter.com/S1C1GiUsYZ
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 22, 2025

"CounterAIPAC," which rails against foreign Jews subverting American politics through AIPAC, turns out to be, get this, an Egyptian subverting American politics by representing himself as America First.

Account: “Counter AIPAC!”
Account slogan: “America First!”

Account base: Egypt. 🤡 pic.twitter.com/PyGSlEENby
— Nazi Hunters (@HuntersOfNazis) November 22, 2025

Other accounts seeking to subvert American politics are owned by leftists in Canada. But they claim they're rootin'-tootin' American patriots.

The subversive foreign influencer account Jvnior (JvniorLive) is Canadian.

He was lying about being American in order to interfere with our politics.

AMERICA FIRST. pic.twitter.com/jIvOEfGlM7
— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) November 22, 2025

One odd thing: There are apparently a lot of "Native American" accounts calling for hatred and violence against the white man for stealing their land. They turn out to be based in... Bangladesh.

People have been saying for years that "Twitter is not real life," and it definitely seemed that Nick Fuentes' crew of Hitler-admirers had an outsized presence on Twitter not visible in real-life America.

That's because a lot of them are just Islamic Jew-haters and anti-American trouble-makers and dissent-sowers in foreign countries.

Robby Soave @robbysoave
I was reflexively disinclined to believe it was all foreign accounts promoting racism and anti-Semitism under the guise of the pro-Trump America First banner. That sounded too easy, and similar to the (now debunked) idea that all the Trump content on Facebook in 2016 was actually Russian bots.

But... this "account based in" feature actually has unmaked tons of groypers as Pakistani, as far as I can tell? Very useful feature, and kudos to Elon Musk and the X team for implementing it. The hate is not coming from inside the house!

This guy, with an all-American face and an all-American family, said his family had converted to Islam and faced "threats of being fired"!

Country where the account is based: West Asia.

LOL he deleted his post pic.twitter.com/Cz2K9LNbZP
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) November 23, 2025

I saw one "America First" account exposed as run from Pakistan objecting: Just because I'm in Pakistan, my opinion doesn't count?

Not in American politics, Mohammad. And you seem to have understood your opinion didn't account when you pretended to be an American.

There's a lot of this, as now-exposed-as-foreigners "American influencer" accounts argue that Americans should be accepting of "outside voices" subverting their politics.

Spoken like a foreign intruder https://t.co/foDUK1R2Wt pic.twitter.com/Fyrkah46jY
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 24, 2025

Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog
17h

We cannot have a coherent or productive political debate if the dialogue includes a whole bunch of random foreigners from all across the world who have no stake in this country, no skin in the game, and no first hand knowledge of our culture at all. It is very important to identify the foreign intruders and bully them mercilessly until they shut up and leave us alone. We cannot talk about or fix any of our problems with a mob of foreigners constantly barging into the conversation.

We are nigh-constantly bombarded with "outside voices" telling us Americans how to vote -- all of the foreign media, most foreign governments. The UK's Labour Party sends over political operatives to interfere in our elections.

We put up with a lot of "outside voices."

I do think we can and should draw the line at dirty foreigners pretending to be Americans. This is astroturf. We didn't accept it when David Axelrod flooded the internet with "Concerned Christian Conservatives" telling us that Barack Obama was the True Conservative Choice for president, and we shouldn't accept these foreign psyop operatives interfering in our elections either.

All this said, X acknowledged that the location provided for some accounts may be inaccurate.

"This is an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square. We plan to provide many more ways for users to verify the authenticity of the content they see on X," Bier wrote on X on Saturday.
Not everyone was eager to reveal the origin of their accounts. Users in places that limit freedom of speech could face political repercussions. Some users called it forced doxxing. Others said that if a user created an account using a VPN routed through another country, the location information may not be accurate.

On Saturday, X removed information about where some accounts were created. Bier said the data "was not 100 percent," especially for older accounts, and that the company plans to "bring it back by Tuesday."

Five hours later, he posted again: "I need a drink."

Late Sunday, he added that there would be an upgrade in 12 hours and that location accuracy would be "nearly 99.99%."

X appears to have factored in the VPN point. On Monday morning, Business Insider tested the "About This Account" feature from a device using a VPN and found a notice that warns the "country or region may not be accurate" due to the use of a proxy.

The location function also comes with an accuracy disclaimer, which states: "The country or region that an account is based can be impacted by recent travel or temporary relocation. This data may not be accurate and can change periodically."

I've seen people say that while some podcasts -- like Tucker Carlson's -- have big ratings, most of those viewers are actually foreigners who are, for reasons you can guess, very invested in his heavy anti-Israel/anti-Jewish propaganda.

I don't know if there's any way to prove that. It makes sense but I don't know who would have those numbers. Tucker Carlson would -- but he's not revealing them.

Close it up

Posted by Ace at 03:40 PM Comments

The Morning Report — 11/26/25

—J.J. Sefton

Daily Tech News 26 November 2025

—Pixy Misa

Tuesday Overnight Open Thread - November 25, 2025 [Doof]

—Open Blogger

The Beastmaster Cafe

—Ace

Trump Turns Turkey Pardoning Ceremony Into Roast of Joe Biden's Autopen Pardons

—Ace

Amazing: The New York Times Profiles an Illegal Alien Who Stole an American Man's Identity and Caused Him 20 Years of Legal Nightmares.The Times Say They're Both Victims.

—Ace

For Some Reason, Vanity Fair Will Publish an "Abstract Nude" Photo of Its New West Coast Editor and Weird Dick-Riding Flake Olivia Nuzzi

—Ace

Leftwing Propaganda Media Declares DOGE Dead

—Ace

Trump Moves to Designate Some Chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood As Terrorist Organizations

—Ace

GOP Worries About Midterms "Wipeout"

—Ace

Under Questioning By, Surprisingly, the Leftwing Media, Democrats Admit They Can't Name Any Illegal Orders Trump Has Issued

—Ace

One Old Soldier's Perspective [Diogenes]

—Open Blogger

Mid-Morning Art Thread

—CBD

The Morning Report — 11/25/25

—J.J. Sefton

Daily Tech News 25 November 2025

—Pixy Misa

Monday Overnight Open Thread (11/24/25) Live From NY Edition

—Misanthropic Humanitarian

De Children of De Night Cafe

—Ace

Trump: I'm Ending the "Temporary" Protected Status of Somalis Immigrants, Which Has Now Been "Temporary" for (Checks Watch) Thirty Years

—Ace

Supreme Court Stays Left-Wing Rogue Judges' Ruling That Texas Is Not Allowed to Draw Its Own Congressional Maps

—Ace

Major "America First" and "America Only" Twitter Accounts Exposed as Foreign Grifters

—Ace

Amazing: The New York Times Profiles an Illegal Alien Who Stole an American Man's Identity and Caused Him 20 Years of Legal Nightmares.
The Times Say They're Both Victims.