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Never steal her cookies!
- In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson recounts how a child’s mistaken phone call 70 years ago prompted the North American Aerospace Defense Command to start annually tracking Santa’s Christmas sleigh progress.
The same history is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.
- Sarah Cooper and family have a wonderful, musical Peanuts Christmas:
- driftglass borrows from Patton, with Santa giving a pep talk to the troops as they bravely fight against the War on Christmas:
- Infidel753 responds to the War on Christmas with history, logic, and a few words on what Christmas has become in real life.
A good, very good, piece.
- News Corpse compares Trump’s 2025 Christmas greeting with Trump Christmas messages in years past and senses a recurring pattern.
Heartwarming, isn’t it?
- Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger keeps track of the numbers. Most every group, including most Republicans, think Trump’s snide remarks about the murders of Rob and Michele Reiner were inappropriate.
There was one exception. MAGA Republicans, as opposed to Republicans as a whole, were split about evenly.
- Frances Langum brings us a discussion as Nicolle Wallace of MS NOW hosts Michele Norris, also of MS NOW and Angelo Varusone of Media Matters, talking about public outrage over Donald Trump’s bombast after the murders of Rob and Michele Reiner. He seems to be losing support even among right wing rank and file:
- CalicoJack in The Psy of Life describes a series of Trump related insights as an Off the Editor’s Floor collection.
The headline provides an apt summary:
Trump’s Atrocities, the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the Wiles Interview, the Speech, and the Growing Body Count - Journalist Marcy Wheeler at EmptyWheel hosts author and blogger Rayne on the tenure so far of RFK, Jr. Rayne takes administration health policies personally:
For the first time since he was in the service in the 1950s, my father may not be home for Christmas.
- Scotties Playtime has links to stories on affordability, war crimes, corruption, and bigotry.
- M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has a pretty good headline:
“Trump says he will lead the design of his new class of warships along with the Navy ‘because I’m a very aesthetic person’”
The new boats will likely never be built, largely because they are militarily unsound.
M. Bouffant links to a couple dozen stories, quoting experts.
His subheadline is an accurate summary of their combined consensus:
A “Golden” Fleet Of Sitting Ducks - Journalist Arturo Dominguez reports on what country is sending weapons to gangs and cartels in the Caribbean, forcing desperate victims to flee here.
An increasingly dependable source of death.
- Dave Barry provides a wacky view of a wacky year with his 2025 year in review.
I have several favorite entries. Just one involves the US taking back what we did, after all, build.
FEBRUARY
…when President Trump threatens to slap tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada and China, all of which were originally built by Americans. Tariffs are taxes, so this would mean that the American consumer would pay more for these goods. To understand why this is a shrewd business tactic, consider an analogy: You’re in a dispute with your neighbor, Bob. So you go to Bob’s house and ring his doorbell. When he opens the door, you turn around and punch the American consumer in the face. Take that, Bob! - Author and educator Amanda Nelson looks over the first year of the Trump administration and counts down the ten most embarrassing moments:
- 60 Minutes produces a well-researched story on immigrants arrested by ICE and sent to a prison in El Salvador known for torture. In fact, the warden proudly boasts about the torture and assists reporters by showing how it works. Reporters asked the Trump administration for interviews, but officials refused to present their side or comment at all.
Bari Weiss, the new Trump approved overseer at CBS News, approved the story, then spiked it at the last minute. Her reason was that 60 Minutes had not presented the administration point of view.
Jason Linkins gets the principle involved about right:
to announce to all the world that you won’t run a story if a subject withholds comment is to effectively kill your news organization; you’re just doing PR now
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) December 22, 2025 at 10:09 AM
It seems Weiss forgot to prohibit the broadcast in Canada. That broadcast has been copied by multiple viewers and preserved.
Here is where Jason is glad to get it wrong:
you'll never see this reporting
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) December 21, 2025 at 4:04 PM
I am particularly happy that this turned out to be a poor prediction!
— Geoffrey Hatchard (@imgoph.bsky.social) December 24, 2025 at 12:47 PM
I’m chuffed as well!!
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) December 24, 2025 at 12:48 PM
CBS seems, since, to be playing a sort of whack-a-mole, using their copyright to go after those copies. It isn’t working. The broadcast is popping up everywhere.
Like so many other Trump-instructed cover-ups, it accomplishes the opposite of what is intended.In this case, it seems possible even more viewers know about it than if the conspirators had simply let it show.
The humor involved is itself pretty much spiked. We are, after all, talking about kidnap and torture.
- Julian Sanchez looks at the spiking of the 60 Minutes story on CECOT and senses a bit of ineptitude:
I’m curious what she thought was going to happen here. Did it not occur to her that swooping in at the last minute to kill a story on specious grounds might antagonize the journalists who worked on it? That such intervention was likely to blow up in a rather spectacular and embarrassing way?
— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) December 21, 2025 at 9:17 PM
- In The Borowitz Report, Bari Weiss announces new limits: CBS will now have zero tolerance for news.
- In Canadian satire, The Beaverton suggests that Canadian employees of CBS did not deliberately air the CECOT report. Maybe it was accidental.
The Headline:
American media’s cowardice no match for Canadian media’s incompetence - Bill Buckley once remarked on a failed assassination attempt on Indonesia’s President:
[It] had all the earmarks of a CIA operation: everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno”
It occurs to me that a recurring pattern exists in administration attempts to conceal everything from Epstein files to economic data fit the same pattern. They are astonishingly inept.
tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors has a few details showing the attempt by Trump loyalist Bari Weiss at CBS to bury the now famous 60 Minutes story on the kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture of immigrants fits the pattern.
Key competence level:
How could Bari Weiss not know that it was being broadcast in Canada?! They think they are Lex Luther and instead they are all Otis.My thought:
It has all the earmarks of a Trump operation: the cover-up blows the cover. - Trump’s Justice Department just discovered a million more Epstein documents.
Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit is greeting the oops‑we‑just‑now‑noticed claim with some skepticism.
- As cover-ups go, this one is turning out to be hopeless:
Hackwhackers has a few Epstein examples as more and more denials are confronted by more and more mentions of Trump.
- Remember Q and followers, with all their weird conspiracy theories?
Dave Columbo wonders where they all went, now that their conspiracy beliefs are turning out to be true, although with a different cast.
- At The Moderate Voice David Robertson wonders if Marjorie Taylor Greene just caused Hell to freeze over.
- Vagabond Scholar remembers Dick Cheney and somehow manages to subdue his fondness.
- Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson seems a little down on someone who asks friendly, softball questions of a Hitler enthusiast on his talk show:
I liked @jpodhoretz 's comment that if a demon attacked Carlson, the demon won. https://t.co/0JAeFLHdW6
— James Wigderson (@jwigderson) December 21, 2025
- In Rural Missouri, Jess Piper takes a look at our other Senator, the one who is not Josh Hawley.
Senator Eric Schmitt on What is an American:
America is not “a proposition” or a shared set of values, rather it is a country for White people descended from European settlers, whose accomplishments should not be diminished by acknowledging the people that some of them enslaved, the Native Americans they killed, or anyone else denied equal rights at the founding.Nice.
He seems like a 1947 Theodore Bilbo reincarnate.
- PZ Myers watches Benny Johnson at TPUSA, angry as hell that the assassination of Charlie Kirk didn’t become a Reichstag moment in which leftists are taken out and killed.
From Benny:
And what has made me so angry about this moment is that it should have been a unifying moment for us all to say what a horrid and wretched ideology. Now it’s time to kick in doors, right, come on FBI, do some door kicking, round ’em up. - North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz begins with a blunt recognition:
There’s no other way to say it: these are dark days here in America.
And this lack of light has nothing to do with the orientation of the planet and everything to do with the trajectory of our nation.He suggests an answer: Work at becoming one of the lights in the darkness.
An upbringing:
In the faith tradition I was raised in, I always understood Christmas as the celebration of a great light coming into the world, of hope overwhelming the thick darkness, of something beautifully redemptive showing up in the most dire of moments.
It was the arrival of unfathomable goodness being born in the dark and the cold, amid the smell of mud, damp straw, and animal dung.
Christmas, as I understood it, was the presence of peace arriving when peace seemed impossible.A key message:
All I know is that these are dark days, and more than ever we need fiercely decent people to stay and stand and to split the darkness in ways that only human beings burdened to stay human can.
If you still have a spark left within you, protect it, nurture it, kindle it… share it.
Look around you.
Look carefully.
Strain to see the things and the people who give you hope, even if you have to look past so much that tempts you to feel hopeless.
Unearth the beautiful things trapped beneath the rubble of bad news and altered stories and future fears, even if it takes more energy than you think you have.
The beautiful things are worth it. - Dave Dubya goes to history on past advocacy of using government to stamp out non-Christians, then pretty much demolishes MAGA claims of sole ownership of faith.
- When hate gets accepted as part of worship:
@whiskeywhistle98 and a friend watch and react: - The Propaganda Professor looks at claims that Hitler was an atheist, finding evidence that he claimed Christianity as his belief.
- In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce asks for evidence that the Bible is inerrant.
- Coverage from The Onion comes from an undisclosed location as the nation’s oppressed Christians huddle underground to light a single shriveled Christmas shrub.
Poor persecuted us…
- Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes explores the nature of self, ego, and wisdom.
- In Happiness Between Tails da-AL hosts author and photographer Crystal Stewart, who tells of her journey in writing, inspired by a college class trip to hear Maya Angelou.
- The Journal of Improbable Research features a study by researchers at the University of Pisa in Italy of a subset of chimpanzee and their facial expressions during sex.
Something I’ve always been curious about.
- SilverAppleQueen has sleepy cats on a crowded pillow.
For more wisdom, we go to our proven sources of internet acumen:
2 responses to “Week of Holiday Cheer (Sort of)
NORAD Tracks a Sleigh, War on Christians, Trump Heartwarming Message, Warships, 60 Minutes, CECOT Torture, Racism, Chimp Sex”
Thank you for linking Scottie’s, Burr! And this is yet another fine piece of work about the less finer pieces of work these past few days; thank you for it, too.
love it! even jesus is fed up with religion & church lol. tx for linking my site here. hope you’re enjoying peaceful healthy holidays, Burr.