Roaming Charges: the Politics of Crudity and Cruelty

– Lou Reed, Busload of Faith

Rob Reiner used to call once every six months or so during Bush Time. I’d answer the phone. 

“Rob Reiner’s office calling,” a pert but authoritative voice instructs. “Please hold for Mr. Reiner.” 

Reiner comes on, “Alex, what are we…” 

Me: “Jeffrey.” 

Rob: “What?” 

Me: “It’s Jeffrey, not Alex.” [Cockburn had stopped answering his calls after he couldn’t squeeze any money for CounterPunch out of him.] 

Rob: “Ok, whatever. But what the hell are we going to do about these Bush fuckers, man…?” Then he’d laugh into a hilarious rant of expletives and invective about Cheney and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, his voice rising in volume like an approaching tsunami. Concluding with, “Got any ideas? Huh? Do ya? Just send them down to me. You’ve got the address, right?” Click.  

This ritual went on for eight years. Then, after we started laying into Obama for committing many of the same acts of governmental malfeasance as Bush, he stopped calling. And I never heard from him again. 

Reiner was a liberal Democrat to the core. Blinded by party loyalty, he became a hardboiled Russiagater and offered excuses for many inexcusable acts by HRC and Biden.

But he was more passionate than most of the soulless post-Clinton suits who have run the party for the last three decades. Reiner was funny and had a sense of irony about himself, which few self-righteous Hollywood liberals seem to possess. I sensed that he genuinely cared about the poor and the marginalized and knew the system was rotten at its core and needed change, even if the only change he could envision was so incremental it was barely noticeable and easily erased once the Berserkers took power.

+++

+ This is evidence of a sick mind: petty, petulant, crude and sadistic…but but also one that likely needed help writing this depraved attack on two people whose blood was still wet from having their throats slit by their own tormented son, since the words “tortured” “unyielding” and “affliction” don’t come naturally to Trump’s limited lexicon..

+ Given a few hours to reconsider his debased Truth Social post on the slaughter of the Reiners, Trump instead opted to double down on his bad bet and spew yet more corpse abuse: “He [Rob Reiner] was a deranged person…Trump derangement syndrome. I was not a fan. I thought he was very bad for our country.”

+ As evidence that Trump’s macho bombast may be losing some of its mesmeric mojo, the slurs and slanders didn’t land well with some of his own reactionary base…

“Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered. I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.”

– Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)

“This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.”

~ Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

“The Right uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s death. This is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.”

– Jenna Ellis, Trump’s former hapless attorney and recipient of a Trump pardon for her conviction by guilty plea for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 elections.

“When people say horrible things about Rob right now, I find it, quite frankly, infuriating and distasteful. Did I agree with his politics? I did not. Did I love him as a friend, as an artist, as an icon of Hollywood and as a patriot? I most certainly did. And I am just absolutely devastated by this terrible event, especially for his family.”

– rightwing actor James Woods

+ Even MAGA actor and hyper-Zionist, Rob Schneider, not known for his political spine, called Trump’s post-mortem slurs on the Reiners “outrageous.”

+++

+ Rarely has a president been caught in a more transparent lie and so viciously denied it…

Rachel Scott, ABC News, White House Correspondent, December 8:  Mr. President, you said you would have “no problem” releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth said…

Trump: No, I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that. This is ABC Fake News.

Scott: You said you had no problem releasing the full video. Okay. Well, Secretary Hegseth says it’s now under review. 

Trump: Whatever Hegseth wants to do is okay with me.

Scott: He now says it is under review. Are you now ordering the Secretary to release that video?

Trump: No. Whatever he decides to do is okay with me. So, every boat we knock out of the water. Every boat, we save 25,000 American lives. That was a boat loaded up with drugs–I saw the video–they were trying to turn that boat back to where it could float. And we didn’t want to see that because that boat was loaded up with drugs, just like everything else. Every boat we shoot down–and I don’t know if you know this, but we’re 92 to 94 percent down in drugs coming in by sea. And we’re trying to find the other six percent, because, I don’t know, people don’t like to drive boats right now loaded up with drugs. But think of that, on average, every drug boat we shoot down, we save 25,000 American lives.

Scott: But have you seen the full video?

Trump: Didn’t I just tell you that? You are one of the most obnoxious reporters in the whole place. Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious…actually, a terrible reporter. And it’s always the same with you. I told you whatever Pete Hegseth wants to do is okay with me.

Let’ go to the tape from December 3rd, Don…

+ Weijia Jiang, CBS News White House Correspondent: You released the first video, but will you release the second video from that strike on September 2nd, so that the American people can see for themselves what happened?

Trump: I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem. 

+ I’m pretty shaky at math, but 25,000 times 25 boat strikes equals something like 625,000, which means that Trump has already saved 9 times as many lives as the number of Americans who die in drug overdoses each year. That is miraculous! No wonder the Christian nationalists adore him.

+ Hegseth is now suddenly hesitant to show the snuff film of his “kill them all” drone strike on the two survivors, who clung for more than 30 minutes to the wreckage of the boat hit by the first strike, hiding behind the excuse that the footage, which he has been so eager to broadcast for the past four months, is now “top secret.”

+ Just put the link to the video on your Signal chat group, Chardonnay, and it’ll leak out. You know, having others watch the kill strikes excites you.

+ By the way, none of the “drug boats” the US has sunk off the coast of Venezuela were heading, at least directly, to the US. The drug boat hit in the double-tap strike that killed 11 people was heading to Suriname.

+ Presumably, as a legally dubious pretext for attacking Venezuela, Trump has designated “fentanyl” as a “weapon of mass destruction,” even though Venezuela is not a major producer of the drug and, according to his own DEA, “Fentanyl is a potent synthetic opioid drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as an analgesic (pain relief) and anesthetic.”

+ Jesse Walker: “I hear the hospitals in Saddam’s Iraq had huge stockpiles of fentanyl. If only Dick Cheney had lived to see this.”

+ Jim Cooper: “So these are the unknown unknowns of Donny Rumsfeld…!?”

+ Spot the real weapon of mass destruction…

Number of yearly deaths in the US from tobacco: 440,000, including 40,000 from passive inhalation of tobacco smoke

Number of yearly deaths from fentanyl overdoses: 71,000

+ If the US can seize (illegally) an oil tanker, why can’t they seize (illegally) a small “drug” boat?

+ Trump on Venezuela: “They took all of our oil and we want it back. They illegally took it.” The jarring jump cut from drugs to oil was almost Godard-like in its abruptness.

+ “Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Stole from us!

+ Phillip II of Spain must’ve harbored similar fantasies of invincibility when his Armada of 122 ships entered the English Channel in June of 1588…

+ The sudden admission by Trump that it’s all about oil even caught the anti-Maduro liberals off-guard: “Mr Maduro’s claims that the US is solely motivated by oil. Those [claims] seem overblown.” – Guardian editorial board Dec 12. (H/t Adam Johnson)

+ AOC on the Trump administration’s classified briefing to Congress on Venezuela: “It was a joke….not a serious intelligence briefing…the communication of an opinion.”

 

+ Because Calibri is apparently too woke and girly, Marco Rubio ordered the testosterone-infused State Department to shift its official typeface to Times New Roman. “Times New Roman doesn’t fare very well on a screen. It’s too delicate to survive on that pixel grid, all those fine serifs,” Tobias Frere-Jones, a typeface designer, told the New York Times.  “And it’s not surprising that it doesn’t fare so well on a screen because it was designed in the early part of the 20th century. No one was working on a screen. So it’s a bit like driving around in a Model T and wondering why you can’t go so fast.” Of course, at the Trump State Department, where sowing confusion and incomprehensibility is the goal, Times New Roman seems like the perfect choice, for once…

+++

NEWSMAX: Your goal is 5,000 arrests in New Orleans. How did you come up with that figure?

+ According to an analysis by Stateline, ICE is arresting more people,  but few of them have violent records. By October, less than 5% had violent-crime convictions and 44% were detained only for immigration violations.

+ New data from DHS reveal that over 75,000 people with no criminal record were arrested by ICE during the first 9 months of the Trump administration. Instead of targeting criminals, the Trump immigration raids have targeted the people who are the easiest to find: undocumented people with no records who are living and working openly, paying taxes and abiding by the law.

+ Criminal History of Immigrants Arrested by ICE

Los Angeles Area
With violent convictions: 6% / No criminal charges: 57%

Chicago Area
With violent convictions: 3% / No criminal charges: 66%

Washington, DC
With violent convictions: 2% / No criminal charges: 84%

Boston Area
With violent convictions: 2% / No criminal charges: 63%

Source (DHS/NYT)

+ Newsweek calls the purge of immigration judges by the Trump administration a “hostile takeover” of the federal system of immigration courts. One former judge said that the judges Trump has fired, including some of his own early appointments, were known for giving immigrants brought before their courts “due process.”

+ Samuel Saxon, an ICE agent based in Cincy, was arrested this week for choking a woman, causing visible bruising to her neck. Saxon is facing charges of felonious assault, strangulation and domestic violence. This was the 22nd time police had been called to the house in the last 18 months. After the previous calls, the victim refused to testify against her attacker, but this time, there were other witnesses to Saxon’s assault.

+ Any Lucia Lopez Balloza is a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College outside Boston, where she is majoring in business. Lopez Balloza came to the US in 2013 with her parents, who were fleeing persecution from gangs and death squads in Honduras. She spent most of her youth in Texas, where she worked as a teenager, learned fluent English, never got into trouble with the law and became an excellent student. She was such a good student that she earned a scholarship to Babson, where she hoped to learn the business and marketing skills that would help her start and manage a tailor shop with her father.

Then, on November 20th, while Any was waiting at Logan Airport to board a flight home to Texas for the Thanksgiving holiday, she was told that there was an issue with her boarding pass. As she returned toward the ticketing booth, she was surrounded by immigration agents, who placed her in handcuffs like a violent criminal and hauled her out of the airport. Less than 48 hours later, Lopez Balloza was in Honduras, a country she hadn’t been in since she was seven years old. This student with no criminal record was deported despite a federal judge’s order blocking the government from evicting her from the US or even transferring her out of the state of Massachusetts.

In those two days between her arrest at Logan and landing in Tegucigalpa, Trump’s immigration agents kept Lopez Belloza on the move so that her lawyers couldn’t locate her. They first took her to ICE headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. After a few hours in custody there, she was driven to a nearby military base. From there, she was placed on a transport flight to the big ICE prison at Fort Bliss, Texas, where she was locked in a cell overnight.

The next morning, she was rousted from her cell, her wrists placed in handcuffs, her ankles shackled and chained. Then she was placed on a plane and deported to Honduras.

Lopez Balloza has no criminal record. She was never shown an order of removal or a warrant for her arrest. ICE agents never even told her why she was being deported. But her case exposed a chilling new tactic by the Trump administration to hide detainees from their lawyers and the courts and use “lightning deportations” to deny detained immigrants due process and evade judicial review of their legally specious actions.

Viktoriia Bulavina was at the last stage of her final green card interview when ICE agents entered the room and arrested her. After fleeing the war in Ukraine, Bulavina entered the U.S. legally under a humanitarian program. She is married to a US citizen. She has no criminal record. ICE took her to a federal detention center, where she is scheduled for deportation back to Ukraine.

+ George Retes, a US veteran, testifying before Congress on being detained by ICE:

I identified myself as a US citizen and a veteran, but that didn’t matter. Agents smashed my window, sprayed tear gas and pepper spray into my car, and dragged me out. Even after I complied, I was taken to a detention center and held for 3 days without charges. No phone call, no lawyer, no medical care, even though my skin burned from the chemicals.

+ Migrant children are spending much longer in government custody this year than in the past. Earlier in 2025, the average stay in detention was about 30 days; by August, it had grown to 179 days.

+ The Trump administration is incompetent even in the things they claim to be super-competent at: “Federal prosecutors spent over a year working to extradite a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling more than $2 million in sensitive U.S. aviation equipment into Russia as it waged war on Ukraine. But the case could fall apart because the defendant, Yana Leonova, is now at risk of being deported before going to trial.”

+ From the You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Til It’s Gone Newswire:  According to Gallup, Americans’ support for immigration hit an all-time high this year: Four out of five Americans are pro-immigration. More than four times as many say it’s good for the country as say the opposite.

+ Nicolas Cabral, the husband of an ICE agent in South Jersey, was arrested for driving around in his wife’s official cruiser and impersonating an ICE agent.

+ In an apparent attempt to harass workers who have been on strike at the Mauser plant in Chicago since June, Border Patrol chieftain Gregory Bovino showed up with his praetorian guard of armed and body-armored officers on the picket line of Teamsters Local 705 on Tuesday. Bovino taunted the striking workers and left without any arrests.

+ Thomas “Bag Man” Homan: “Stephen Miller is one of the most brilliant people I have met in my life. President Trump brought together one hell of a team and the success proves it.”

+ According to the New York Times, the Trump administration has set a quota of denaturalizing 100-200 US citizens every month. Historically, denaturalization is a rarely used procedure reserved only for cases involving fraud in citizenship applications. In the last eight years, the Justice Department has brought only 120 such cases. Trump is seeking to expand the process to go after people from countries he doesn’t like or who hold dissident political views. 

+ From the You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Til It’s Gone Newswire:  According to Gallup, Americans’ support for immigration hit an all-time high this year: Four out of five Americans are pro-immigration. More than four times as many say it’s good for the country as say the opposite.

+ ICE has compiled a secret watch list of immigration attorneys, whose activities they monitor, and then it accidentally published it…

+ Trump last weekend in Mt. Pocono, Pennsylvania:

We had a meeting and I said, Why is it we only take people from shit hole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few, let’s have a few, from Denmark? Do you mind sending us some nice people? Do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia… places that are a disaster place are a filthy, dirty and disgusting place, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.

+ At a naturalization ceremony in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, immigrants who had been approved for citizenship were ordered to “step out of line” by federal immigration agents just moments before pledging their allegiance to the USA and told that their citizenship applications had been denied because of their countries of origin.

+ From the You’d Have to be Crazy to Travel Here Wire: The Trump administration plans to require all visitors to the US to disclose five years of their social media history.

+++

+ I love the facial expression on this young elk we disturbed from her grazing along the Skipanon River outside Astoria this weekend. It looks like she forgot to put in her dentures…or, more likely, she finds the smell of humans incredibly obnoxious.

+ One hundred and fifty years ago, the US had nearly four times as much forest cover as France. Now, the two nations are roughly equal. 

+ According to a new paper published in Nature Communications, peak glacier extinction will occur in the next 15 to 30 years: “Here, using three global glacier models, we project a sharp rise in the number of glaciers disappearing worldwide, peaking between 2041 and 2055 with up to ~4,000 glaciers vanishing annually.”

+ The massive flooding in Sumatra may have been a death knell for the world’s endangered great ape,  the Tapanuli orangutan. Primatologists are calling the flooding an “extinction-level disturbance” for the species, which has fewer than 800 individuals left. Large areas of habitat have been destroyed and ape conservation groups estimate that as much as 11% (35 or more individuals) of the orangutan’s entire population may have been lost. 

+ The Trump administration is pulling the plug on one of the world’s leading climate research stations, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Known as the “Global Mothership” for climate and weather forecasting, Ross Vought, Trump’s hatchet man at OMB, says the Center needs to be eliminated because its research and forecasts spread “climate alarmism.” This is the climate equivalent of Trump trying to tell people that their food and energy prices have gone down, not up.

+ In New York City, congestion pricing has led to a 22 percent decline in particulate pollution, a study finds.

+ The Fish and Wildlife Service has seen a 20% decline in staff since Trump took office. Meanwhile, an internal report from the Forest Service shows dilapidated bridges and eroding and blocked trails across the national forest system due to a lack of staffing.

+ The Trump administration has nearly doubled the amount of formaldehyde considered safe to inhale under EPA regulations. Formaldehyde causes far more cancer than any other chemical in the air.

+ The highly toxic herbicide paraquat is banned in 70 countries around the world. But it’s still legal in the US, where its use has been linked to thousands of cases of Parkinson’s disease in farmers, farmworkers and nearby populations through pesticide drift.

+ A new research paper (Optimal Urban Transportation Policy: Evidence from Chicago) using detailed data on Chicago’s transportation system, determined that the optimal pricing for public transport is…ZERO.

+ On Thursday, the US House made the politically vindictive and ecologically illiterate decision to arbitrarily remove the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act, even though the wolf’s population remains well below the already suspect recovery levels set by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

+ Wolf sightings in northern California’s Siskiyou County have prompted lycanthrophobic local officials to adopt new “safety measures” for elementary schools. Of course, the real safety measures need to be applied to protect the wolves from shoot-on-sight ranchers, not the school kids, who’d get a kick out of seeing the recently returned wild canids lope across the slopes of Mount Shasta or prowl the rims of the Klamath River canyons.

+ If you’re interested in wild canids and cats, I encourage you to visit Tom Skeele’s informative new project, the Carnivore Conservation Compendium…You’ll learn more about them there, than you ever will here.

+ Alexander Metcalf, lead researcher in a University of Montana study of human tolerance for wolves in Montana:

Contrary to many assumptions and media narratives, most people have positive attitudes toward wolves and are tolerant of them. This is true around the world and even here in Montana, where we estimate 74% of Montanans are tolerant or very tolerant of wolves. In Montana, people also tolerate wolf hunting and lethal control in response to conflict–this sets Montana apart from Europe and elsewhere.

The study, which looked at attitudes toward wolves by Montanans in 2012, 1017 and 2024, found that tolerance of wolves in the state has increased from 41% to 74%, while their tolerance of wolf hunting has declined by 13 points to 58% over the last 10 years.

+++

POLITICO: I wonder what grade you’d give the economy 

TRUMP: A+

POLITICO: A+?

TRUMP: A+++++

+ Is Trump grading the economy on the Laugher Curve?

+ Scott Bessent, longing for a return to the policies that led to the Great Recession: “These 2008, 2009, 2010 financial rules were too tight. They hamstrung the American financial system. It was time for a change. We’re gonna be safe, smart, and sound in terms of our deregulation. But we have to take the financial system out of this straitjacket. This substantial increase in private credit, which is outside of the regulated banking system — that tells me that the regulated system is too constrained.”

+ The US economy is on track for its worst year of job growth since 2020 and the onset of Covid. If you remove the pandemic, it’s set to be the worst year of job growth since the Great Recession of 2009.

+ Federal employment is now at the lowest level since 2014 — down by 271,000 jobs since Trump took office.

+ The jobless rate for both teens and Blacks jumped in November, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The jobless rate for Blacks surged to 8.3%, the highest reading ‌since August 2021, while the rate for teens soared to 16.3%, the highest level since August 2020.

+ Heating costs are expected to rise by 9.2% this winter across the United States.

+ The latest economics lesson from the Bezos-owned Washington Post: CEOs deserve big paychecks, while they crush unionizing efforts by their underpaid workers…

+ Jim Cramer: “There’s no antitrust. Antitrust went away when we got a ruling that it was okay to pay Apple $20 billion to keep everybody else out.”

+ In the last five years, the wealthiest 20 Americans increased their net worth from $1.3 trillion to $3 trillion. Whether the economic policies are those of the neoliberals or the Trump Republicans, the same people keep making out.

+ The US unemployment rate has hit 4.6%, the highest since September 2021. Not only are there more unemployed than at any time in 4 years, but they’ve been unemployed for longer and longer. In November, 24.3% of the unemployed had been hunting for a job for at least 6 months, up from 23.6% in September. In November 2024, the figure was 23.1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

+ The Trump economy has barely added any jobs since April.

+ Trump: “Instead of a 4% GDP or 3% GDP, it should be able to be 20 or 25%. I don’t know why it can’t be.” Wharton wants its degree back. Or should.

+ If you can follow this logic, you’ll breeze right through Derrida’s Of Grammatology…Trump:

You can give up certain products. You could give up pencils. Because under the China policy, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need 1 or 2. They don’t need that many. You always need steel. You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. 2 or 3 is nice. So we’re doing things right.

+ Anagram, a Disney contractor, is paying incarcerated workers in Minnesota prisons as little as $0.90/hour to package balloons.  The Minnesota Labor Coalition is demanding that the company pay imprisoned workers a minimum wage. 

A new study from the Center for Effective Global Action estimates that ending global poverty is both possible and affordable. The study estimates that the cost of ending extreme poverty using direct income transfers would be only 0.3% of global GDP.

+++

+ As Trump prepares to launch his big crackdown on the Left, here’s how to tell if you may be on the target list. Have you ever espoused opinions that might be interpreted as advocating:

–“anti-Americanism,”
– “anti-capitalism,”
–“anti-Christianity,”
–“opposition to law and immigration enforcement,”
–“radical gender ideology,”
–“hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.” 

+ The Left seems a lot more pervasive than I thought…

+ David Mamet has always been a jackass, but whatever’s below rock bottom, he just hit it…

+ Erika Kirk, already a millionaire before the Lord Almighty claimed her husband, has raked in another $10 million+ since Charlie ascended to the heavens, according to a report in the Daily Mail. It really is the prosperity gospel!

+ Despite the Apotheosis of Charlie Kirk, the GOP is DOA with young voters and the Democrats, under the sclerotic leadership of Schumer and Jeffries, still can’t break 50%…

New – Generic Ballot poll (Age 18-29)

Democrats 47%

Republicans 19%

YouGov #A – A – 12/1

+++

+ Here at CounterPunch we take our nourishment where we can and we are currently feasting on the news that David Brooks, the moralizing columnist for the New York Times, who has consistently downplayed the Epstein scandal, once comparing it to QAnon conspiracy theories, has now shown up in several photos from the vaults of the Epstein estate released by House Democrats, including this shot of a giddy Brooks sitting next to Google’s Sergey Brin at an Epstein hosted event.

+ Despite polls showing that public support for the death penalty has hit a five-year low, the US will execute more people this year than in the last 15 years. The surge in killings is largely driven by the state of Florida, where the DeSantis death machine has executed 19 people in 2025, 40 percent of the national total. Florida is one of only two states that allow non-unanimous juries to render death verdicts.

+ The Washington Post reports that the Supreme Court is “wrestling” with death penalty cases involving “intellectual disabilities,” though I doubt they’re throwing each other to the mat over it. Bill Clinton certainly didn’t. In fact, he saw it as a political opportunity and didn’t hesitate to divert himself off the campaign trail to Little Rock in 1992 to supervise the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, who had 3 third-grade reading and writing skills as an adult and suffered severe brain damage after shooting himself in the head in a failed suicide attempt. At his last meal, Rector said he was saving his pudding for later. Clinton made a big show of casually killing Rector to boost his tough-on-crime cred and then-flagging poll numbers. Sick guy. Clinton, I mean…

+ Brown University had to correct a dangerous and incorrect post by the President of the United States, as a mass shooting was taking place on campus. Then Trump blamed Brown, not his own FBI, for his potentially fatal blunder.

+ After Kash Patel’s FBI agents wrongly arrested an Army sniper for the Brown University shooting, leaked his name and photo to the press and bragged about using “advanced cell-phone tracking technology” to enable the (false) arrest, Patel’s incompetence as FBI director is comical, up to the now seemingly inevitable point where it gets someone killed…

+ Moments before he pulled the trigger on his Mauser rifle, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, bragged to a friend about solving a Wordle puzzle in only three tries. The answer was “pouty.” 

+ At least 54% Americans agree with the proposition that “When it comes to politics and society, nothing really matters because powerful people will always do whatever they want.” 

+ While Trump’s support from MAGA has fallen by 7 percent since his inauguration, his support from “traditional” Republicans (whatever that means) has risen by 7 percent. 

+ John Cassidy, writing in the New Yorker, on how the Trump family ventures have cashed in on his presidency:

As the anniversary of Donald Trump’s return to the White House approaches, keeping up with his family’s efforts to cash in is a mighty challenge. It seems like there is a fresh deal, or revelation, every week. Since many of the Trump or Trump-affiliated ventures are privately owned, we don’t have a complete account of their finances. But in tracking company announcements, official filings, and the assiduous reporting of several media outlets, a clear picture emerges: enrichment of the First Family on a scale that is unprecedented in American history…. in terms of the money involved, the geographic reach, and the explicit ties to Presidential actions—particularly Trump’s efforts to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the world”—there has never been anything like the second term of Trump, Inc.

+ You can see why Trump wants to keep states from regulating AI…

+ According to Fox News, Americans need to buy artificial trees so Christmas tree farms can be turned into data centers: “Everybody needs to get on board.” Weren’t these the same people who tried to ignite a national hysteria over the alleged War on Christmas and the proliferation of Black Santas, when it was Big Tech that killed Xmas all along?

+ HRC to Rachel Maddow:  “Americans who engage in misinformation should be civilly or criminally charged.” Will Hillary get immunity?

+++

+ Jacqueline Rose in the LRB on Netanyahu: “Netanyahu is trying to absolve himself of a guilt whose reality he denies. He wants to be declared innocent without being convicted of anything. He seems blithely unaware that the more one tries to repudiate guilt, the more it entrenches itself, bringing the wrath of the gods, so to speak, down on your head: guilt is tenacious, or it is nothing.”

+ In a meeting at the White House, Trump’s ultra-Zionist mega-donor Miriam Adelson said she had consulted Alan Dershowitz in Israel about how to sidestep the Constitution and get Trump a third term as president: “We can do it… think about it. I will give you another $250 million.”

+ Trump: “If you go back 10, 12, 15 years ago at the most, the strongest lobby in Washington was the Jewish lobby. It was Israel. That’s no longer true. You have to be very careful. You have a Congress in particular that is becoming antisemitic. You have AOC plus three, you have those people.”

+ Lindsey Graham blamed the ISIS-inspired shooting in Australia on…Biden’s withdrawal from: “Obama and Biden have a lot to do with this…. Dumbass Biden—the biggest dumbass on the planet—withdrew from Afghanistan.”

+ NYC council member Vickie Paladino called for the “expulsion of Muslims from Western nations.” Zohran Mamdani’s response was swift: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who will be the city’s first Muslim mayor, said in a statement: “A million Muslims live in New York City. We belong here, as does every other New Yorker. This is vile Islamophobia from the Councilwoman and it has no place in our city.”

+ Bari Weiss has signed several new contributors to CBS News, including Trump’s former national security advisor H.R. McMaster and ex-Marine commando Elliot Ackerman, who led a 2008 raid on a neighborhood in the Afghan village that killed 90 people, nearly all of them civilians, including 60 children. Now he’s a manless guru. CBS will pay Weiss’s new crop of right-wing “contributors” $30,000 up front and another $1,000 per appearance.

+ All of you belly-aching Marxist-Leninist homos could move to Iowa, but you won’t…!

+++

+ Next, private equity will see a source of profit in fire-starting and they certainly wouldn’t want you keeping your forests well-raked. (Around 100 firefighters are convicted of arson every year in the US. Now they’ll be tempted to light fires for hire.)

+ With his personal wealth now topping $600 million, Elon Musk is now worth more than the combined wealth of Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

+ After saying he was “done with politics,” Musk is now considering dumping millions into GOP candidates for the House and Senate in the 2026 midterms.

+ A California judge ruled that Tesla should face a 30-day suspension of its licenses to sell and manufacture cars in the state because of deceptive marketing around its use of the terms “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving.” According to a report on the case by Electrek, “Tesla has been selling level 2 driver assist software since 2016, which it calls ‘Full Self-Driving’ (FSD), despite that this software did not (and still does not) make its cars capable of driving themselves.” The court ruled that the claim that Teslas were “Full-Self-Driving” was “actually, unambiguously false and counterfactual.” Tesla’s defense was that no reasonable person would believe that “Full Self-Driving, actually meant Full Self-Driving, thus echoing Fox News’s claim in a libel suit that no reasonable person would take anything Tucker Carlson said seriously.

+ Electrek also reported that Tesla’s Robotaxi is crashing roughly once every 40,000 miles since its deployment in Austin, and that’s with a human safety supervisor in the vehicle. (The average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles.)

+ 16 Democratic senators colluded with Republicans to confirm billionaire and “private astronaut” Jared Issacman to head NASA. Isaacman is an intimate of Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has billions in contracts with the space agency and is seeking billions more.

Baldwin
Cantwell
Durbin
Fetterman
Gallego
Gillibrand
Hassan
Heinrich
Kaine
Kelly
Kim
King
Schiff
Shaheen
Slotkin
Warner

+ Even Fox News is beginning to realize something is terribly amiss, even if they don’t say that the men-children who advocate pull-ups for preventive health care are largely responsible……

+ Rep. Ryan Zinke on healthcare: “I would imagine we’ll probably get some bills to reduce overall care.” I imagine you will…

+ Steve Scalise on the GOP’s health care plan: “Everybody complains, ‘Why when I watch TV commercials do I see this Gecko lizard and emu and all these other animals out there selling car insurance and homeowners insurance? Why aren’t they selling health insurance?’ That’s because the laws at the federal level prohibit the ability for people to have choices to get lower-cost products for health insurance.” You don’t really have that in health insurance. So we want to open up the marketplace … we’re gonna give people options.” I don’t know about you, but when it comes to deciding our insurance policies, I only trust the advice of AI-generated marsupials.

+ Thanks to a national government committed to the health care and nutrition of its citizens, Chinese 5-year-old girls are now taller than their counterparts in the US…

+++

+ A couple of weeks ago, after the US Institute of Peace was renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, I predicted that it was only a matter of time before the Kennedy Center was renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center. That time has come, according to WH Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who announced the news, congratulating both Trump and President Kennedy, who she seems to believe survived the assassination, is living on some island in the Pacific with Marilyn Monroe, perhaps…

+ You heard it here first…

+ Here are the members of the Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center, who voted to put his name on the building…

+ What’s next? The Trump-Lincoln Memorial? Washington, DT?

+ Trump on Leavitt: “She gets up there with that beautiful face and those lips that don’t stop. Ba-ba-bup-bop-bop like a little machine gun.”

+ In response to Trump’s absurd suit against the Pulitzer Prize Board for defending the prize to Washington Post and New York Times reporters’ coverage of Russiagate, the Board’s attorneys are seeking discovery of Trump’s financial records, tax returns, psychological records and prescription medications:

To the extent You seek damages for any physical ailment or mental or emotional injury arising from Counts I-IV of Your Complaint, all Documents (whether held by You or by third parties under Your control or who could produce them at your direction) concerning Your medical and/or psychological health from January 1, 2015, to present, including any prescription medications you have been prescribed or have taken. For the avoidance of doubt, this includes all Documents Concerning Your annual physical examination. To the extent you do not seek such damages in this action, please confirm so in writing.

+++

+ Amanda Seyfert: “Socialism is a gorgeous idea… How about we all don’t have any kind of agendas? How about our agenda is to take care of each other? I know [socialism] doesn’t work perfectly, or that people understand what the word actually means. For me, it’s taking care of each other. If I have more money, I can spend more money on other people.”

Photo: Elena Ternovaja, Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

+ Did you notice that socialist celebrities tend to look like recognizable human beings, instead of some reconstructed visage from the operating table of Dr. Moreau with Hello Kitty eyes and lips blown up to the size of the Michelin Man’s legs…

+ Masha Gessen on The Voice of Hind Rajab:

The Voice of Hind Rajab” had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September and took the Grand Jury Prize, the second-highest honor. A few days later, it was screened to great acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival. High-profile U.S. distribution companies came calling. But then, the producers Odessa Rae and Elizabeth Woodward told me, one by one, the companies peeled off. In the end, Woodward, who has a small distribution company, put together something akin to self-distribution. The movie opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday. Elsewhere in the world, this film, shortlisted for the Oscar for best foreign movie, has major distributors — but not in the United States or Israel. That’s a kind of coordination, too.

+ The Clash’s triple album box set Sandinista! turned 45 this week. I remember dropping a week’s worth of beer money to grab it the day it showed up at Olson’s Books and Records in Georgetown and driving my Pure Prairie League-loving, econ major housemate insane playing it at max vol for the next week or two…(Sorry, Rick. Not.)

+ Last weekend, I put on my body armor and helmet and ventured into the flaming streets of war-torn Portland and let me tell you, it was rough out there…

+ When I encountered the warning sign about insurgent rabbits, I reached for my Holy Hand Grenade, only to feel an empty pocket, having left the blessed weapon back in the lockbox in the demilitarized zone of Oregon City.

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Bremen 1965
Thelonious Monk
(Sunnyside)

Lightning Might Strike
Juliana Hatfield
(American Laundromat Records)

The Studio Albums: 1970-77
T. Rex
(Edsel)

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Lab Dog: a Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research
Melanie DG Kaplan
(Seal Press)

The Complete Notebooks
Albert Camus
Trans. Ryan Bloom
(Chicago)

The Genius Bat: the Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal
Yossi Yovel
(St. Martin’s)

Beyond the Wildest Dream of King Midas

“What we are looking at on all our TV sets is a man who finally, after 24 years of frenzied effort, became the President of the United States with a personal salary of $200,000 a year and an unlimited expense account including a fleet of private helicopters, jetliners, armored cars, personal mansions and estates on both coasts and control over a budget beyond the wildest dream of King Midas … and all the dumb bastard can show us, after five years of total freedom to do anything he wants with all this power, is a shattered national economy, disastrous defeat in a war we could have ended four years ago on far better terms than he finally came around to, and a hand-picked personal staff put together through five years of screening, whose collective criminal record will blow the minds of high-school American History students for the next 100 years.”

– Hunter S. Thompson, on Nixon, Rolling Stone, September 1973

The post Roaming Charges: the Politics of Crudity and Cruelty appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.