Week of Holiday Cheer (Sort of)
NORAD Tracks a Sleigh, War on Christians, Trump Heartwarming Message, Warships, 60 Minutes, CECOT Torture, Racism, Chimp Sex

The same history is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.

A good, very good, piece.

There was one exception. MAGA Republicans, as opposed to Republicans as a whole, were split about evenly.

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

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:

An increasingly dependable source of death.

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!

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:

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:

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.

The Headline:
American media’s cowardice no match for Canadian media’s incompetence

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.

Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit is greeting the oops‑we‑just‑now‑noticed claim with some skepticism.

In Hackwhackers has a few Epstein examples as more and more denials are confronted by more and more mentions of Trump.

Dave Columbo wonders where they all went, now that their conspiracy beliefs are turning out to be true, although with a different cast.

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.

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.

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.

Poor persecuted us…

Something I’ve always been curious about.