“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.”

– Baudelaire

+ How Trump began his masterpiece of doublespeak to the leadership of the American military, summoned to Quantico, Virginia, this week:

We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day – every day, the guy’s falling down stairs – and I said, that’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m very careful, you know, when I walk down stairs, I walk…very…slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just, try not to fall, ‘cause it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen, and it became a part of their legacy, you know. Walk nice and easy. You don’t have to set any records. Be cool! Be cool when you walk down, but don’t…don’t bop down the stairs. The one thing with Obama…I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen…da-da-da-da-teh-deh-bop-bop…I’ve never seen…he would go down those stairs, bop-bop, he wouldn’t hold on, he’d go down those stairs, I said, it’s great! I wouldn’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually, bad things are gonna happen, and it only takes one. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell. We had nothing.”

+ Trump told the generals, he wants the military to occupy Chicago because Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is “stupid” and didn’t make his own money (neither did Trump, but he lost a lot of his dad’s):

I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. Not National Guard, but our military. Because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor. Stupid. They threw him out of his family business, he was so stupid. I know the family. But he becomes governor. He’s got money. Not money that he made. But he ran for governor and he won and now he criticizes us all over.

+ As loco as this rationale sounds, it’s probably a more substantial casus belli than they have for droning Venezuelan fishing boats in the Caribbean.

+ Trump told the stone-faced military brass that the enemy they need to start focusing on is the “enemy within.”

Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.

+ The president wasn’t pleased by their stoic reaction to his declaration of war on American cities:

I never walked into a room so silent before…If you want to applaud you applaud. You can do anything you want. If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. There goes your rank and there goes your future.

+  Hegseth: “As history teaches us, the only people who actually deserve peace are those who are willing to wage war to defend it. That’s why pacifism is so naive and dangerous.” Move over, Count Tolstoy! Sit down, Mr. Gandhi!

+ Trump, who can’t help bragging about the secrets he knows, lets one slip during his harangue of the generals about sending two nuclear attack submarines to the Russian coast:

We were a little bit threatened by Russia recently, and I sent a submarine, a nuclear submarine, the most lethal weapon ever made. Number one: you can’t detect it. We’re 25 years ahead of Russia and China in submarines. Russia’s actually second in submarines. China’s third. But you know, they’re coming up, they’re coming up. They’re lower in nuclear, too, but in five years they’ll be equal. They’re coming up, they’re coming up. But you don’t have to be that good with nuclear. You could be one-twentieth of what you have now and would still do that damage that would be, you know, that would be so horrendous. But I announced that based on his [Putin aide’s] mention of nuclear, and it was really a stupid person that works for him who mentioned the word nuclear, I moved a submarine or two, I won’t say about the two, over to the coast of Russia. Just to be careful, because we can’t let people throw around that word. I call it the N-word. There are two N-words and you can’t use either of them. You can’t use either of them. And, frankly, if it does get to be used, we have more of them than anybody else. We have better. We have newer. But it’s something I don’t even want to think about. But once somebody mentions it, that submarine started there immediately. It’s just lurking, but I’m sure we weren’t going to have to use it. But it’s amazing. It undetectable. Totally…Ours is. Theirs isn’t. Their’s is totally detectable. We can detect them easily. We go right to the spot. But we have genius apparatus that doesn’t allow detection. It doesn’t allow detection at all, by anybody. Above water or below water. Just incredible. We’re way ahead of everybody. 

+ Hegseth: “It is tiring to look out and see fat troops, likewise unexpected to see fat generals leading command, it is a bad look. Bad and not who we are.” If Hegseth gets tired just looking at his hefty troops and their leaders, is he really in that great of shape? And what about the Commander in Chief?

+ When Ralph Nader campaigned on “cutting fat” from the Pentagon, he was referring to the budget, and big-ticket weapons systems like SDI and the F-35, not the waistlines of generals.

+ Hey Pete, what’s the ideal fighting weight for a drone operator?

+  If Napoleon’s troops had been fatter, more of them might have survived the winter retreat from Moscow. Something for Pistol-whipped Pete to contemplate as they approve long-distance strikes on Russia.

+ WSJ: “Trump considering lifting restrictions on use of US-made long-range weapons for Ukraine to strike inside Russia.” The Trump faithful must be suffering from ideological whiplash. Just as they’d learned all of the pro-Russia arguments by rote, he proposes doing things to Russia even Biden and Victoria Nuland wouldn’t have done.

+ Hegseth: “We’re empowering drill sergeants to instill healthy fear in new recruits, ensuring future war fighters are forged. Yes, they can shark attack and toss bunks, swear, and yes, they can put their hands on recruits.”

+ Hegseth to the generals and admirals at Quantico: “You see, the Ivy League faculty lounges will never understand us, and that’s okay. Because they could never do what you do. The media will mischaracterize us, and that’s okay. Because deep down they know the reason they can do what they do is you.” (Hegseth has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.)

+ Gillian Branstetter: “It’s impossible to separate Hegseth’s vision of ‘warrior culture’ from his storied history of violence against women, fundamentalist faith in the patriarchy, and his own pathetic insecurities. His own mother has said as much.”

+ Trump on Portland: “It looks like a war zone… Unless they are playing false tapes, this looks like WW II. The place is burning down. You must be kidding. This place is a nightmare. It’s one of the worst. It’s brutal.”

+ Thelma Johnson: “I’ll tell you how bad Portland is, I went downtown to get my usual ‘Sanctuary Lake’ scented candles, but they were out, so I had to get ‘Rosemary & Sage’ instead. I’m 83 years old, I don’t have time for this.”

+ Will Trump’s troops pull down Raymond Kasky’s statue of Portlandia (our version of Saddam) when the “liberation” of Portland has achieved “mission accomplished” status?

+ George Stephanopoulos: “Do you believe it’s appropriate to use American cities as training for the U.S. military, calling those people in the American city as the enemy within?”

House Speaker Mike Johnson: “I’m not going to comment on your characterization of what the President said.”

+ CNN: “Some people took issue with the president saying his directive for Secretary Hegseth was that American cities should be used as training grounds for the military for future wars. Did you take issue with that?”

Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH): “I don’t think he’s actually meaning that our cities are going to be training grounds.”

CNN: “Why do you think he didn’t mean that? Because he said this could be an issue for the people in this room.”

Turner: “I think he doesn’t mean in the manner in which you said it.”

CNN: (Quotes Trump) “I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. Not National Guard, but our military.”

Turner: “It’s a common theme of his.”

+ Joe Scarborough: “When the law forbids the military from being used for crime prevention, do you have any concern about the president talking about using the military to fight ‘the enemy within’ and use cities as a training ground?”

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI): “Again, what is so unfortunate is that we’re even having this conversatio–”

Scarborough: “I’m just asking you a simple question. Do you support the military being used for crime control in American cities?”

McClain: “Do I like it? No, I don’t. But at some point, people have to follow the law.”

Scarborough: “Back to the question — do you support the military engaging in crime control?”

McClain: “What I care about is safety.”

+ Jimmy Kimmel: “I love the idea that Donald Trump is lecturing these guys on fitness. Listen up, generals, the Pillsbury Dough President wants you to do Pilates. If you get so fat you start breaking escalators, you are unfit to serve in the military.”

+++

+ In a scathing 161-page ruling, federal judge Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, finds that the Trump administration’s policy targeting pro-Palestinian students for deportation violated the First Amendment. He opens his decision with a threatening handwritten postcard he received, saying, “Trump has tanks and pardons…what do you have?” The judge responds: “Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People … have our magnificent Constitution.”

+ In his decision, Judge Young slams ICE’s use of masks…

ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence…Can you imagine a masked marine? It’s a matter of honor–and honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan.  In all our history, we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. In carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.

+ Judge Young’s conclusion was equally coruscating…

+ Broadview, Illinois, Police Chief Thomas Mills on ICE attacking first responders and citizens in the village:

We are experiencing an immediate public safety crisis. The deployment of tear gas, pepper spray, mace and rubber bullets by ICE near the processing center in the village of Broadview is creating a dangerous situation for the community and all first responders. Broadview residents, police officers and firefighters, and paramedics are being exposed to these agents. Our own Broadview police are routinely being exposed to ICE tear gas…

+ National Lawyers Guild report on ICE’s actions at the Broadview, Illinois detention center last weekend…

+ While they’re droning suspected “drug boats” in the Caribbean, a Reuters investigation found that the Trump administration is prosecuting the fewest number of drug trafficking cases in decades, largely because Trump ordered the DEA and DHS to concentrate on deporting immigrants instead.

+ Trump, Hegseth and Rubio probably thought that no one would try to find out who they’ve been killing in their extrajudicial drone strikes on small boats in the Caribbean. But the NYT’s Julie Turkewitz located the wife of one man who went out fishing and never returned: “In an interview, one woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the dead men said that her husband was a fisherman with four children who left one day for work and never came back.”

+ Foreign student arrivals to the US are the lowest in more than four years. 

+ You may remember the story of Leo Garcia Venegas, whom I wrote about back in the spring. Leo was a construction worker in Alabama who was chased down by ICE while on a job laying concrete. He was tackled, handcuffed and arrested, even though he had an ID in his pocket proving he was a US citizen. 

On May 21, Garcia Venegas was part of a large crew of workers when ICE agents descended on a private construction site.  The masked men jumped over a fence, ran past black and white workers and began snatching Latinos, including Leo’s brother. Leo took out his cell phone and began filming the raid. He was quickly accosted by an ICE agent, who told him: “You’re making this more complicated than you want it to be.” The officer then grabbed Leo, who yelled over and over, “I’m a US citizen.” The officer responded by saying,” Get on the fucking ground.” 

The ICE officer finally pulled Leo’s wallet out of his pocket, examined his Real ID and told him it was a fake. They held him for more than an hour in the blistering Alabama heat before finally checking his Social Security number and releasing him.

Three weeks later, Leo was working on another house when ICE officers again raided the neighborhood. Two ICE agents detained him in the bedroom, cuffed him and marched him outside. He again told his captors he was an American citizen born in the United States. Again, he showed them his REAL ID. Again, the ICE officers told him it was probably a fake. He was held handcuffed for half an hour before being released. Two other US citizens were arrested by ICE in the same raid.

Garcia Venegas is now suing the Trump administration to stop its warrantless raids on construction sites targeting Latinos without any probable cause and ignoring their claims of citizenship. 

“I got arrested twice for being a Latino working in construction,” Leo said. “It feels like there is nothing I can do to stop immigration agents from arresting me whenever they want. I just want to work in peace.”

+ A federal court in Massachusetts ruled that non-citizens lawfully present in the United States have First Amendment rights…

+ ICE pulled everyone out of a southside Chicago apartment building, put them in handcuffs and checked their legal status after they were detained, in a blatantly unconstitutional trial run for the widespread military occupations Trump has promised to inflict on Democratic cities: “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.”

+ Tracy Kurowski: “Many were disrobed as the raid occurred after midnight, their babies being taken from their arms. They deployed from helicopters and U-Haul vans, deploying flash grenades. The area is poverty-ridden and near the lake, so prime gentrification material.”

+ Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson on the ICE operation in the city’s South Shore neighborhood early on Tuesday morning: “What we simply know is that you have masked men with large weapons that are simply disappearing people from their homes. We’re talking about children being stripped away from their parents. We’re talking about workers that are being targeted.”

+ Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, decried the immigration policies of Trump’s White House, comparing them to an “assault” that

seeks to make life unbearable for undocumented immigrants….We are witnessing a comprehensive governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women, who have through their presence in our nation been nurturing precisely the religious, cultural, communitarian and familial bonds that are most frayed and most valuable at this moment in our country’s history.

+ Thousands of people with green cards are being arrested and deported for bounced checks and traffic violations from 10 years ago, while the Irish MMA fighter Conor McGregor, with his long criminal history of assault, dangerous driving, disorderly conduct and sexual assault, is being invited to “perform” at a cage fight on the ellipse of the White House.

+ Chris Buhalis: “With that resume it’s a wonder he wasn’t offered a cabinet post.”

+ Last week DHS called his conduct “unacceptable.” Now the ICE officer who slammed a distraught Ecuadoran woman, whose husband was being dragged away from her, to the floor has returned to “duty,” confirming this is exactly who they are…

+ Miguel Angel Garcia Medina is one of the immigrants shot at the ICE processing center in Dallas. He remains in critical condition in intensive care. When his pregnant wife showed up at the hospital, she found that ICE had shackled him to his hospital bed.

+ Last week, I wrote about the killing of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, who was shot by an ICE agent after dropping his daughter off at pre-school. ICE originally said that Villegas-Gonzalez was shot after he tried to run over an ICE agent, who DHS claimed had been severely wounded. Then, video of the incident recorded the voice of the officer grazed by Villegas-Gonzalez’s car saying his injury was “nothing major.” Another video showed that Villegas-Gonzalez was driving away from the ICE officers, not toward them. DHS tried to smear Villegas-Gonzalez as a dangerous criminal with a “history of reckless driving.” But a new report by NBC News Chicago shows that he had never been convicted or even charged with a crime.

+ On Saturday, ICE detained and then released journalist Steve Held in Illinois. On Sunday, ICE officers did this to CBS Chicago’s reporter Asal Rezaei…

+ Pro Publica followed up on MSNBC’s Carol Leonnig’s reporting on how Trump’s border Homan took $50,000 in a bag from FBI agents posing as contractors with a piece detailing how associates of Homan tried to position themselves to profit off of Trump’s mass deportation plan. The Pro Publica investigation focuses on Homan’s lucrative partnership with Charles Sowell, a Pennsylvania businessman who “led companies to believe his connections to the future border czar could help advance their bids for government work.”

+ In body cam footage obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, federal immigration agents are heard talking about the conditions at the ICE processing center in McAllen, Texas. One of the agents, who said he was an “intelligence officer,” described his experiences there:

I would not let anybody out of their cells. So we did it in an orderly fashion, had them all line up. “It’s bathroom time,” or “It’s fucking brush your teeth time,” or “It’s food time.” Other than that, “Nope, your ass is staying there.” “But you can’t do that.” “I absolutely can.” “I need a phone call.” “No, you don’t.” “I need to go to medical.” “Nope, you look good to me.” 

The agent said they kept the bathrooms inside the cells where people were held. He said he didn’t have any qualms about treating the detainees so harshly because he considered them “animals:” “They’re animals anyway. That’s what I would tell my kids all the time.”

+ Meanwhile, a Border Patrol agent, speaking to a colleague after a raid on a nutritional bar factory in New York, described the people he arrested there as “literal street rats” who would “eat our kids for breakfast.”

+ Are you willing to detain and deport US citizens? Can you see fit to hold 5-year-olds hostage? Do you have any problem violating court orders? Are you physically capable of body slamming 90-lbs. women to the pavement? Then have we got a job for you: ICE is now offering new recruits $50,000 bonus, $60,000 student debt repayment, and 25% premium pay.

+++

+ Netanyahu to his fellow Israelis on the Trump plan for Gaza, which was negotiated between Trump, Netanyahu and Tony Blair, apparently with no Palestinian involvement:

This is a historic visit. Instead of Hamas isolating us, we turned the tables and isolated Hamas. Now the entire world, including the Arab and Muslim world, is pressuring Hamas to accept the terms we set together with President Trump: to release all our hostages, both living and deceased, while the IDF remains in most of the Strip. Who would have believed this? After all, people constantly say, the IDF should withdraw… No way, that’s not happening.

+ Textbook blaming the victim, which, when it comes to Palestinians, has always been an essential element of the NYT stylesheet. In WW II, the perpetrators of genocide were “de-radicalized.” Here, the New York Times demands that the victims of genocide be “de-radicalized”.

+ Meanwhile, the Likud-backing Israeli paper owned by the Adelsons told Israelis not to worry: the Trump plan is only “rhetoric.”

+ The New York Times has been asking this question in polls since 2000. This the first time in 25 years that more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis…

+ This same poll showed that majority of American voters now oppose sending additional economic and military aid to Israel, in what the NYT called “a stunning reversal in public opinion since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.”

+ Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the belated recognition of Palestine by the UK, Canada, Australia and France:

Recently, a number of Western governments announced their recognition of the state of Palestine. Moreover, they announced their intention to do so several months ago. The question then arises, why did they wait so long? It seems that they had hoped that soon, by the time the General Assembly session was convened, there would be nothing and no one left to recognize.

+ Try “de-radicalizing” this: “All of Gaza, and every child in Gaza, should starve to death. I don’t have mercy for those who in a few years will grow up and I won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid, Fifth Column hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though they are still young and hungry. I hope they may starve to death and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem. We did not learn from Mamalik to leave seeds of him. There are no innocents in Gaza.” – Rabbi Ronen Shaulov, one of the more prominent rabbis in Israel

+ Q: How did the White House decide it was appropriate for Jared Kushner to be working on matters that involve Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia — 3 countries combined that have given him more than $2.5 billion.

Karoline Leavitt: It’s frankly despicable that you’re trying to suggest that it’s inappropriate.

+ There’s something about the diminutive but fearless Greta that really triggers the inner depravity of her haters…

(This guy is a self-described “security consultant” and frequent commentator on NewsMax.)

+ Mike Huckabee’s remains fixated on using his wife as a metaphor of the US’s relationship to Israel:

I’ve been married 51 years … There comes a point where there’s just no point in even thinking about getting a divorce. The reason Israel and the US will never get a divorce is because neither country can afford to pay the alimony …We’re hooked up for life.

+ Dr. Mohammed Mustafa, a British trauma surgeon who spent months volunteering in Gaza: “People will deny children are targeted…but when you’re in Gaza holding lifeless children, kids with heads missing, taking plastic bags off mothers with melted children inside…they’re being killed in grotesque, inhumane ways at mass scale.”

+ Jeremy Corbyn in South Africa on the news of Tony Blair maneuvering to become Viceroy of post-genocide Gaza: “All I can say about Tony Blair is: I know him, I’ve met him, I’ve argued with him, and personally, I wouldn’t elect him to be a dog catcher.”

+ Israel is paying Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale $6 million to create websites and content designed to train AI models like ChatGPT with pro-Israel messaging…

+ The University of Southern California has sold at least 89 “fresh cadaver bodies” to the US Navy, for trauma surgery training by the Israeli Defense Forces. In the last seven years, USC has made nearly $1.1 million from these contracts. According to Annenberg Media, USC is the only university in the US “that had similar contracts involving the IDF.”

+++

+ I don’t recall Fox covering the double-digit increase in beef prices under Biden as a “boom for the cattle industry.”

+ Just 54% of US adults view capitalism positively, down from 60% in 2021 and the lowest since Gallup began asking the question in 2010, according a Bloomberg poll.

+ In response to Trump’s tariffs, China stopped buying US soybeans, striking a devastating blow to American farmers in the midwestern states that have served as Trump’s base. Then Trump decides to bail out the Argentine economy to the tune of $20 billion, which had been predictably routed by the gonzo policies of his chainsaw-wielding pal, Javier Milei, who turned around and sold their soybeans at a discount to … China. Well played, Mr. Trump, well played.

+ Nigel Farage last year on the Milei Miracle: “He’s amazing. It’s Thatcherism on steroids. Cutting and slashing. That’s leadership.”

+ One of the principal beneficiaries of the bailout is Bessent’s bestie, hedge fund billionaire Rob Citrone, who placed big (losing) bets on Argentine bonds, even as the fissures began to spread across Milei’s economy, giving rise to suspicions in Buenos Aires and on Wall Street that Citrone had advanced knowledge that a financial fix was in the works.

+ Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association:

We depend on the Chinese market. And right now we have 0 sold for this crop. It’s a 5-alarm fire for our industry. We are not price-competitive with Brazil due to the retaliatory tariffs. Our prices are about 20% higher, and that means that the Chinese are going elsewhere. And the American soybean farmers and their families are suffering.

+ Charlie Angus, former NDP politician and leader of the Canadian punk band, L’Etranger, and the folk band, Grievous Angels:

I was just in Western Canada, where our farmers are having a great year—because we’re exporting into what used to be American markets. Your former allies are walking away, leaving your farmers—who voted for you—in what they’re calling Farmageddon.  We’re now talking with Mexico, with Europe, with countries around the world… Donald—we’re moving on.

+ CNBC on the wretched private employment data for September and August:

Very disappointing. It was a weak number. This is private sector jobs for September. The total comes in negative 32,000. And that was a surprise because economists were looking for an increase of 51,000. Also, the revision was not good. August was revised down sharply, the month now showing negative 3,000 compared to the initial read of positive 54,000 … the labor market is softening.

Softening!

+ Over the last forty years, the percentage of workers in the US who have a “routine” job has dropped from around 55% to 40%.

+ The unemployment rate for 16-24 year-olds has now topped 10.5%.

+ According to the Financial Times, the American manufacturing and construction industries are now experiencing recession-like conditions.

+ UBS estimates that the probability of a recession is at 93%.

+ Despite, or more likely because of, Trump’s tariffs, Chinese exports are hitting record levels in many markets…

+ Commerce Secretary Lutnick: “There are some countries we need to fix – like India and Brazil. These countries need to react correctly to America. They need to open their markets and stop taking actions that harm America.” Yanqui, stay home!

+ Alisa Wood, partner, KKR & Co.: “There are 19,000 private equity funds in the US. There are 14,000 McDonald’s in the US. How are there more private equity funds than McDonald’s? That’s actually crazy, right?” 

+++

+ This week, Trump’s team launched a coordinated assault on renewable energy.

+ Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Fox: “We’re announcing today expanded programs to help the American coal industry. We’re helping it because for years it has been under assault. It was out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, Colorado, and New York City … coal just makes the world go round.”

+ Bailing out a dying industry that has killed and sickened 10s of thousands of workers and the atmosphere…

+ Coal power peaked in the US in 2007. Wind and solar power overtook it in 2024.

+ EPA director Lee Zeldin on why renewable energy is bad: “Those battery storage sites cost a whole lot of money, and they then catch on fire and these local municipalities, fire departments, they aren’t prepared for those massive fires that end up resulting and those environmental impacts.”

+ Interior Secretary Doug Burgum: “There was just a report out — all of these European wind companies, they’ve had a wind drought … All of those European companies are reporting earnings below expectations because the wind didn’t blow as hard this summer as they expected it to do.”

+ A new study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that: “A broad shift to electric vehicles — which are quieter than traditional vehicles — could yield noise reduction benefits of $77.3 billion, concentrated among low-income families in dense urban areas.”

+ Bloomberg News reports that “wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.”

+ New study in Lancet on the plastification of the world’s children:

Children face an urgent threat in the form of hazards posed by plastics in the environment….Robust evidence from laboratory and human studies show that chemicals used to produce plastics contribute to chronic conditions in multiple organ systems and disrupt hormone function, and exposure to plastic-derived toxins is associated with adverse birth outcomes, metabolic conditions, neurodevelopmental disease and disability, and reproductive conditions.

+ Humans inhale as much as 68,000 microplastic particles daily.

+ Only 38% of the California homes lost to fire in the last ten years have been rebuilt. 

+ Reporter: “The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists put out a statement saying that ‘acetaminophen remains a safe, trusted option for pain relief during pregnancy.’ That’s at odds with what you said.”

Trump: “That’s the establishment. They’re funded by lots of different groups.”

+ Surely, the question isn’t whether hospitals should provide emergency medical care to immigrants, but whether they should deny such care to anyone who needs it.

+ According to the Kaiser Family Fund: “Trust in the CDC to deliver reliable vaccine information has fallen among Democrats from 88% in 2023 to 72% in 2025. Trust among Republicans has grown only from 40% to 44%. The Dem decline is 4 times the GOP improvement. Overall, only 37% trust RFK Jr. on vaccines.”

+ Here’s Trump, threatening to cut people off “medically” during the shutdown: “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible that are bad for them. Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like … we can do things medically, and other ways, including benefits. We can cut numbers of people out.” 

+ This is the same Trump who, only days earlier, sent out an AI-meme about fantastical Star Trek-like MedBeds, which can cure any disease and even regrow amputated limbs.

+++

+ Joyce Carol Oates: “Always a sigh of relief when the shooter turns out NOT to be a childless cat lady.”

+ Sparkle strikes again! Federal Judge Sparkle Sooknanan shot down Elon Musk’s bid to transfer the SEC case against him to Texas or New York: “The Court takes Mr. Musk’s convenience seriously, but it also notes that Mr. Musk has considerable means and spends at least forty percent of his time outside his chosen forum.” 

+ Cuomo sets himself up, Mamdani knocks him down…

+ Rand Paul: “If you’re going to criticize the socialist Mamdani for wanting to own grocery stores, you better criticize Republicans who want a share of Intel, of Nvidia or U.S. Steel. Owning even part of the means of production is a step toward socialism. It’s a bad idea and a dangerous precedent.”

+ The hapless Hakeem Jeffries, who still hasn’t endorsed Mamdani, did shower praise on Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted by the Biden Justice Department on five counts of bribery and conspiracy, charges later dropped by Trump: “I respect his contributions to the city of New York … most importantly as someone who wore the uniform to protect and serve.”

+ Trump on the opposition: “I thought [I] would be met with fury on the left, but they’re sort of giving up. I really thought that we were gonna have to sort of fight it through. There’s been no fight.” Indisputable, if he’s referring to the Democratic Party lead by people like Jeffers and Schumer.

+ Pope Leo XIV defended Cardinal Cupich’s decision  Sen Dick Durbin, despite his support for abortion rights, saying:

I think that is very important to look at the overall work that this Senator has done during, if I’m not mistaken, 40 years of service in the United States Senate.  I understand the difficulty and the tensions but I think … it’s important to look at many issues that are related to what is the teaching of the Church. Someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in favor of the death penalty, is not really pro-life. So someone who says that I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who in are the United States. I don’t know if that’s pro-life.

+ Mark Ames:

It’s hilarious that the New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement given that there’s hardly a journalist alive or dead who hasn’t had their work stolen from them and printed in the New York Times without attribution, as a matter of editorial policy.

They ripped CounterPunch off twice in one week this September! Once from a story by Ishmael Reed on Hamilton and once from an exposé of JPMorgan’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein by Pam and Russ Martens.

+ When asked by Miranda Devine of the New York Post how Jeffrey Epstein’s rich pals, like Bill Gates and Prince Andrew, could “hang around him and not see what you saw or see it and it ignore it,” Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Epstein’s neighbor, replied:

They participated. They get a massage. That’s what his MO was. ‘Get a massage. Get a massage.’ And what happened in the massage room, I assume, was on video. This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever. Blackmailed people. That’s how he had money.

Every time Trump tries to bury the Epstein story, it rises right back up off the massage table.

+ Trump on Fox & Friends, whose trio of anchors nodded along like bobbleheads: “I can change the mayor of DC if I want. I can do whatever I want.” Can he? I guess he can if they let him…

+ Ethel Cain on surviving as a trans person in a political climate that is increasingly hostile to trans people:

I’m constantly worried, especially in this political climate. Even just being outspoken on my identity in the trans community and other sociopolitical issues is frightening. I’ve never been in a situation physically where I genuinely feared for my life, which I’m very grateful for. But I have been through things, my family has been through things that were frightening and made me worry, ‘How far are people that don’t like me willing to take this?’

+++

This week, Ben Cohen (partner of Jerry in the making of ice cream) launched DOPE: the Department of Pentagon Excess by taking a chainsaw to a model of the Pentagon on Capitol Hill to promote “accountability” of the Department of War’s budget. Good stuff, Ben. Long time coming. Just one hitch. How about some credit where credit is due, for appropriating my DOPE, man? You could’ve called first? Sent a tub of Cherry Garcia to Oregon City or a bag of those tasty S’more’s Dog Chunks for Lola…

Move over, DOGE and make way for DOPE: the Department of Pentagon Excess…Trump, the Peace President, and Pete Hegseth announced this week that they plan to increase the Pentagon’s budget to a record trillion dollars. (Roaming Charges: Who Shot the Tariffs?, April 11, 2025)

Well, this is the perfect time to make up for it, Ben. It’s CounterPunch’s fall fund-raising drive and you can donate right here.

+ Mike Francesca goes old school on the historic collapse of the New York Mets (Payroll: $370 million):

They aren’t a bad team. They’re a gutless bunch of underachievers. That’s what they are. Gutless to the core, as a group. They should be ashamed of themselves. I never thought they would be this gutless. I never thought that they would not figure it out to this extent. I never thought their pitching would dissolve as badly as it did. But not just their pitching. They were a top-heavy lineup all year. They became a bad defensive team. They became a bad situational team. They became a bunch of gutless bums.

+ At a recent film industry conference, a new actress with the screen name Tilly Norwood made her debut to less than enthusiastic reviews. The AI-generated ingenue was ripped by the SAG-AFTRA union as a dangerous intrusion on labor rights in Hollywood: “Creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.”

+ Of course, not everyone objected to being treated with such job-stealing slop. There’s Tyler Cowan at Bari Weiss’s Free Press: “Tilly Norwood doesn’t need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts and if you with to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances.”

+ Speaking of Bari Weiss…

+ Goodnight and good luck, America…

+ From a Vulture interview with Jim Jarmusch on how he makes ends meet…

I have been very stubborn about the copyright to my films. So once the rights revert back to me, which can be a period of anywhere from ten years in the old days to now more like 25, then I can relicense them. Usually, I go straight to Criterion because that’s my preferred streaming platform, kind of my drug of choice. I’ve been able to sustain my small business, which is keeping my work going…but it’s dwindling down. It’s going in the wrong direction. The money coming in, even though I own the rights to these things, it’s not evening out…Broken Flowers was very helpful to me because Bill Murray and I had back-end in the film and the film did make some money. Whenever Bill got paid, he would say: “Well, did you pay Jim?” And they’d go, “Oh? Oh, yeah, we’ll get right on that.” Bill really protected me and I got paid enough to keep my mother in her own home her last years in Ohio, which was incredibly important to me and very expensive…I could have plotted a much different career path if I was trying to do this as a lucrative professional enterprise. But I’m very stubborn and I always have complete artistic control over my films and who my collaborators are. And I walk away if I don’t have that.

+ The death of Jane Goodall at 92 is a huge blow to all life forms on the planet (and any thinking of landing here).

In Memory of Andy Mahler, Forest Defender

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Cory Doctorow
(Verso)

Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism
Thea Riofrancos
(Norton)

Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves
Steven Higgs
(SH Press)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

The Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control
Gary Bartz
(OYO)

Through the Wall
Rochelle Jordan
(Empire)

Trio of Boom
Nels Cline / Marcus Gilmore / Craig Taborn
(Pyroclastic)

Bred as Domestic Slaves

“Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.”

– Jane Goodall

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