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We begin with a clear case of projection:
- Author and educator Amanda Nelson narrates Donald Trump’s awful, awful week
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit starts with a Trump threat to Indiana Republicans:
Indiana Republicans give their answer, suggesting that Trump engage in an anatomical improbability.
They vote NO, joining Democrats to go thumbs down on the gerrymander Trump is demanding.
- Apparently, someone is finally showing Trump his actual poll numbers.
News Corpse reports that Trump is bitter at finding Americans aren’t giving him credit for America’s greatness (true enough, we aren’t), and that raising questions about his health and declining mental capacity is treason.
- The Propaganda Professor publishes his wonderful, dependable list of Week in Stupid.
My favorite entry is Trump’s acceptance and gleeful glow at the makeshift peace prize from the European football group (that would be soccer to us unsophisticated Americans). If that isn’t hilarious enough, Gavin Newsom has a bit of fun:
- Master of rant Max’s Dad takes on some of the crazier parts of the latest Trump rage rant from the guy who just can’t understand why more folks don’t understand he is the hardest working, most accomplished, best President ever, and that they are lucky to have him.
Max’s Dad chops Trump’s chops into kindling.
- Today’s media is occasionally called out for excessive timidity when reporting on Donald Trump’s more outlandish words and actions.
To be fair, we should give credit for instances of accuracy. After more than 60 consecutive court cases ending with the same conclusion, much of the mainstream media has felt pretty safe in referring to Trump claims about winning an election he actually lost as The Big Lie.
So, yes, we did see headlines that read, with some variation, President Trump Repeats ‘Big Lie’ with an explanation in the report itself.
When the President of the United States refers to an entire ethnicity as garbage, that pretty much meets the dictionary definition of racist.
To be fair, there is room for a minor semantic argument as to whether ethnocentrism is a better fit. Not a great moral difference, especially when we include a racial commonality with similar Trump comments.
Before criticizing the media, it can be a good idea to do a little fact‑checking, even if it’s superficial.
So how’s about a bit of primitive Google search on recent headlines to catch all the references to racism, a racist attack, or even ethnocentrism:
Googling Trump on Somalia:
Trump’s anti-Somali tirade
Trump targets Somali immigrants
Scorned by the president
Trump ‘garbage’ rhetoric about Somalis draws cheers
Trump ventures deeper into anti-immigrant language
Trump says he doesn’t want Somalis in US
Trump Calls Somalis ‘Garbage’ He Doesn’t Want in the Country
Trump’s ‘garbage’ comment met with disappointment in SomaliaNot much in the headlines about a Racist Attack or even Ethnocentric Opinion
Tommy Christopher brings us …well… Tommy Christopher in dialogue with Don Lemon on his podcast/videocast The Don Lemon Show
The entire two minutes is worth a click and the time.
But I liked this from Lemon at about 1:18:
…it goes back to the whole thing about sh*thole countries.
It’s racist, it’s vulgar, it’s beneath the the dignity of the White House, it is sexist.
And quite frankly, it’s just it’s just gross and and Donald Trump seems like a gross, bigoted, racist piece of sh*t!
Lemon asks, reasonably, why mainstream journalists can’t use language similar to that of Trump.
- In Nan’s Notebook, she wonders about Trump’s push, and the Supreme Court’s possible agreement, to end birthright citizenship as provided in the 14th Amendment.
Since birthright citizenship also applies to children of those born in the US, how are we to determine who among us is still a citizen?
- Now class, who can remember the two names that have been in the news as entirely political prosecutions by Trump’s Justice Department?
Right!
Everyone who answered Letitia James and James Comey gets to clean the erasers!Next! How about the other entirely political prosecutions.
Well…
…turns out there are a more prosecutions, many more, that are purely political, with nothing else to back them up. You just don’t hear much about them in traditional news media.Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger helps us out with the 10 worst prosecutions, ten with nothing substantial to justify them.
- Journalist Marcy Wheeler at EmptyWheel has more on the ever weirder prosecution of Congressional Representative LaMonica McIver.
The Congresswoman said she was performing oversight. Prosecutors argued that you can’t claim oversight while you assault ICE officers, so McIver was charged.
Turns out a couple of recorded chat dialogues on Signal chat (Wasn’t Signal the app that got Pete Hegseth in trouble?) were mentioned in court documents, but didn’t turn up in evidence.
McIver’s lawyers wanted the records. DOJ said no, they’re sealed.
The judge said no. You can’t seal evidence just because you want to.The recorded chats were largely about 10 videos of the alleged assault. Those videos were supposed to have been turned over to McIver’s attorneys.
Part of one chat centered on one video that was especially worrisome to participants. Doesn’t make the ICE guy look good, was the comment. Pretty bad for the prosecution.Sure enough, the video shows the ICE guy, the alleged victim of Congresswoman McIver, actually assaulting her.
So, yeah. It would be worrisome to the prosecution.There are other delays as ICE turns over screen shots, rather than actual videos.
Really? Yeah, really.So it seems to an unlawyered outsider (that would be me) like there was an illegally hidden chat record.
The illegally hidden chat was about an illegally hidden video.
The illegally hidden video shows illegal actions by an ICE officer.AND it shows that Congressional Representative LaMonica McIver did nothing wrong.
That raises a few questions, one of which is whether Trump Justice officials all got their law degrees by sending in box tops.
- M. Bouffant at Web of Evil finds a handful of links documenting how Attorney General Pam Bondi is directing the FBI to compile a list of extremists posing a threat of political violence.
M. Bouffant quotes investigative journalist Kenneth Klippenstein on the criteria to be used.
To be subject to surveillance:
The target is those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.”So Trump loyalists are making an official list and checking it twice.
- tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors watches the Trump administration redefine terrorism, then get stumped by an obvious question.
- Journalist Arturo Dominguez finds yet another instance in which DHS debunks its own lie about immigrants
- Brian Beutler has it right. This can’t be justified.
There are no journalism ethics that justify this. There ARE journalism ethics that essentially require non-redaction.
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler.bsky.social) December 12, 2025 at 5:38 PM
- I was a teenager when the novel An Operational Necessity came out. It was about the trial of a German U-boat officer who had ordered a shipwrecked allied crew, helpless and clinging to wreckage, to be attacked by machine gun fire until they were all dead.
The title came from the fictional German submarine officer’s fictional defense. The killings should not be considered crimes because they had a military purpose. Survivors might otherwise have managed to signal allied warships for rescue, thus endangering the German submarine. The killings were an operational necessity.
Even though it was fiction, I was glad that absurd excuse was rejected and the officer was executed.
It turns out the book was based on a very real murder of shipwrecked sailors after a German U-boat attack, and the later very real trial of a very real Nazi submarine officer who used that identical defense: the killings were an operational necessity.
The excuse really was rejected and the very real SOB was hung for that war crime, along with two other officers who followed his barbaric and illegal order.
Good.
At Disaffected and it Feels So Good, Grung_e_Gene is enraged, as we should be, at the September 2nd war crime: the murderous missile attack at sea on two survivors clinging to wreckage.
He dismembers the excuse offered by Senator Tom Cotton.
Cotton Legality:
When asked by Kristen Welker about the men waving a shirt while the US military loitered above them, Cotton replied, “Or it could’ve been an attempt to signal to another cartel boat to come pick them up and pick up the cargo…”So…
…Operational NecessityHeadlined Anger:
The U.S. Military is controlled by Drunks, Incompetents, Traitors and War Criminals for the amusement of racist twitter trolls- Dave Columbo has a word about fighting terrorists while following the law:
- In Canadian satire, The Beaverton reports as the Canadian Ambassador resigns after Pete Hegseth accidentally blows her up.
- From The Borowitz Report, Hegseth orders a deadly naval strike on notorious drug traffickers.
Expert determination:
“I was watching late-night television and a program about these individuals came on,” the Secretary of War said. “I immediately hopped on Signal and ordered the attack.”
Hegseth said that, although the seven alleged narcoterrorists appear to be victims of a shipwreck, “That’s never stopped us before.”
- PZ Myers has some fun with one of those tiresome New York Times efforts to get plain words from plain spoken plain folk in Main Street interviews, this time speaking with random plain Republicans. The subject is whether missile strikes on a couple of shipwreck survivors is wrong.
Professor Myers’ favorite is a Biblical justification offered by one. Since Jesus was willing to break rules against healing on the Sabbath, Pete Hegseth should be able to break rules against killing guys waving their arms for rescue.
A reasonable question:
I’m not sure what the point is, except to let us know that Republicans are assholes.- In Hackwhackers, the prestigious Manhattan Institute poll questioned Republicans about their belief, or disbelief, in a series of absurd conspiracy theories and found that an insane proportion believe insane things.
(My favorite is still the one about the moon landings being fake)
Makes me think Lewis Carroll’s Alice could not be a Republican today:
From Through the Looking Glass
Alice laughed. `There’s no use trying,’ she said: `one CAN’T believe impossible things.’
`I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast…’It appears Republicans are putting in their required practice.
- Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson remembers with fondness local Milwaukee conservative talkshow host Jay Weber. Jay is retiring from radio after nearly four decades. If you like gentle, polite Trump supporting conservatives, Jay is your man.
Having no previous knowledge of the fellow, I can accept in theory a kindly public figure who likes Trump. It’s kind of how I accept quantum physics without understanding it.
In fact, I grew up in an intensely conservative area, which gave me the opportunity to know a courtly gentleman who was a fan of Strom Thurmond, and a local journalist who predicted that Martin Luther King would eventually be known as no more than a violator of countless traffic laws with his “so-called” civil rights objections to completely legitimate Jim Crow laws. (It occurs to me that scare quotes around “so called” can be read as so-called so-called civil rights)
Both were personable.In addition to leaving Republicanism over Trump, James has other qualities that make him more human than most of us.
The second part of his post is a warm, excruciating story about the loss of his mother to illness, and the pain over the years of having to remind his Alzheimer’s afflicted dad that she was gone.
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz suggests we give up on changing hate filled Trumpers and work instead on outnumbering them.
- Juliet at Decoding Fox News watched 17 hours of panic last week. She reports that Fox personalities still blame Biden for the worsening economy, but are now begging Trump to stop talking about affordability as a Democrat hoax and a con job. Seems voters aren’t buying it.
More detailed information is presented by Juliet in an hour long entertaining podcast as Fox freaks out over the economy and possible massive election losses.
- Infidel753 has had a well founded skepticism about uncritical belief in the future of AI. Now he employs a well researched video on how the current AI bubble is leading us toward economic catastrophe.
- Scott Bessent took some well-deserved heat for this:
Julian Sanchez has what should be the final word on the definition of a farmer
By the Bessent definition, I am apparently a computer scientist, a pharmaceutical chemist, and a hotelier.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 4:00 PM
- In Scotties Playtime, blundersonword suggests that those among us who, like him, are not gay, not transgender, not immigrant, and not Hispanic, may still be affected by policies, politics, and rhetoric targeting those who are.
- Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo of Rewire News Group talk about renewed efforts in Texas that could provide a way to ban abortion nationwide yet again with a new set of laws against mailed abortion pills, and anti-abortion laws enforced by bounty hunters.
You may prefer a PDF transcript.
- Frances Langum brings us CNN’s coverage of the long sought pipe bomber of January 6, 2021. Information seems to explode (if you will) MAGA conspiracy theories, including some by now Assistant FBI Director Dan Bongino. Poor Dan now runs away from his own previous accusations.
- In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson begins with an AI experience:
When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”
“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”Her example reinforces her central point: Cable news is destroying U.S. politics..
The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.
- Jason Linkins seems skeptical that new ownership will affect the quality of CNN.
I definitely think that the folks who want to take over CNN at Trump's behest are going to make CNN suck, but for as long as I can remember, making CNN suck has been the dizzy dream of everyone who's owned it. "Make CNN good" isn't in the cards. I want to see what end stage suckification looks like.
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) December 10, 2025 at 1:17 AM
I think that no matter what happens that show where Abby Philip hosts a roundtable of the country's biggest assholes will make the cut
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) December 10, 2025 at 1:24 AM
- Right Wing Watch brings forth White Nationalist Lauren Witze who teaches us that God brought forth the great flood that destroyed all of mankind except for Noah and family because fallen angels mated with humans, produced giant offspring, who then brought pharmaceuticals into the world, along with abortion. Since medicine is a form of witchcraft, God had to destroy the world, presumably along with all those local pharmacies.
- At The Moderate Voice asks about our weekly worship: What would the U.S. be like if Christian churches depicted the ethnicity of Jesus of Nazareth as the Middle Eastern Jew he must have been rather than as a White European?
- In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, an Arizona pastor says a true Christian will always remain a Christian. Anyone who leaves the faith was a fake Christian to begin with.
Bruce isn’t having it. He leaves the good pastor’s argument in tatters.
- In Happiness Between Tails da-AL debunks a dozen or so widely believed held myths about aging.
She guest hosts Nurse Will whose experiences as a healthcare professional and a father give him a sound basis for strategies for parenting children with ADHD and autism.
- SilverAppleQueen does this every once in a while, finding some mostly forgotten gem from the past.
Over a hundred years ago, Willa Cather won fame for her novels about immigrants struggling to make a life in the harsh western wilderness of the US, winning a Pulitzer in 1923.
One paragraph of beauty and desolation comes from a story written 10 years before. The excerpt pictures what briefly remains of departed humanity, fading into desolation, when that struggle is lost. The crushing power of nature reclaims its own.
- Dave Barry provides previously unreported holiday diet tips supported by previously unreported science.
- Tamra Brown finds that not all checkout experiences are polite
- At The Onion, customer service announces that your call will be monitored for sadistic amusement.
- @whiskeywhistle98 brings us what parents know only happens once in a while (and only the parts sung by other children):
- In Nan’s Notebook, she wonders about Trump’s push, and the Supreme Court’s possible agreement, to end birthright citizenship as provided in the 14th Amendment.
We continue with our trusted web prophets writing their words on internet walls and blogging halls:
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