Meanwhile, the winner supports the man who murders civilians on the high seas:
I guess that was smart of her. Why not? Everybody else is kissing his ass. But she may come to regret it. The people Trump is backing to take over after the regime change are just as bad as Maduro.
Update — Oy:
What did he expect? He signed on with a movement that hates him. And I think JD might just have some problems with this crew as well. His wife Usha is also a practicing Hindu.
If anyone thought that Charlie Kirk Memorial Extravaganza wasn’t really a Christian Nationalist Revival Meeting didn’t pay attention. These young people are the heart and soul of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA movement and they took him very seriously. This is what that movement is all about.
When dumbass personalization and amateur hour geopolitics go awry:
The United States is promising to treat Qatar’s security like its own.That single Trump administration decision sets in motion a geopolitical cluster. There’s confusion and jealousy among Gulf states; questions of burden-sharing among NATO allies amid Trump’s push for them to spend more money; and a political meltdown in Israel, among other drama.
There now exists a diet version of NATO’s cornerstone Article 5 agreement between Washington and Doha — an arrangement several Middle East watchers described to Axios as unprecedented.
“The Trump administration may well have intended it one way, and the region could interpret it in another. It could take on a life of its own, in a sense,” Mona Yacoubian at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Axios. Now Qatar “has something that the others don’t.”
Keep in mind that this major change is just the result of a presidential whim:
The new U.S.-Qatar dynamic is the result of executive order, not Senate ratification. Its unilateral nature peeved some on the Hill while also rendering it susceptible to the whims of the next — or even current — president. “These guarantees only go so far as the executive branch. That’s significant, because Qatar has had huge issues in Congress, too,” Yacoubian said. (Qatar has been accused of human rights abuses as well as associating with terrorists, which Doha denies.)
It’s a complicated regional situation that’s obviously too much for the Trump administration to understand:
“I’ve been reading a lot of the Gulf responses as a Gulf realization that the Iranians are not their friends and the Israelis are also not going to be their friends,” Brian Carter at the American Enterprise Institute told Axios. Beyond Qatar, “I think the Saudis and the Gulf states, overall, were very frustrated with how Israel’s been operating in Syria after the fall of the [Assad regime].”
It’s just about the plane. They showed how much they love him and that’s how geopolitics is done now:
Not once is the word “mutual” written in Trump’s executive order. Only once is “our” used. This deal with Qatar basically shows that checkbook diplomacy can be more successful than doing the actual burden-sharing that we officially ask — and even demand — of our allies,” Jonathan Ruhe at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America told Axios. “We’re putting our necks on the line much more than Qatar is.” […]
“Traditionally it’s assumed that bases offer Washington leverage with the host capital,” Behnam Ben Taleblu at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Axios.”Now, in the Middle East, base politics seem to be operating in the background of larger strategic deliberations, offering the host more — not less — leverage the longer the relationship continues.”
“Checkbook diplomacy” is a nice way of putting it. They gave him a plane which he’s going to be allowed to take with him when he leaves office. I don’t know how anyone can say this isn’t an outright bribe.
The good news is that he’s sent Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner over there to straighten out this whole Gaza thing so they can get to work on their international beachfront resort. I’m sure that’s going to work out just great too.
From the moment Donald Trump hit the campaign trail in 2015, he promised the American people he would replace Obamacare with a plan that would offer “such great health care, at a tiny fraction of the cost — and it’s going to be so easy.“ He said, “nobody knows health care better than Donald Trump.“ Ten years of similar promises have shown that replacing the Affordable Care Act wasn’t so easy after all — and that the only health care plan the GOP ever truly wanted was one called “you’re on your own.”
Obamacare is, overall, a successful and popular program — the Republicans’ worst nightmare. So naturally, drunk with power as they are, they’ve decided to take another stab at ruining it, which is why they decided to let the subsidies that have been in place for the last five years lapse. Experts say this will cause premiums to skyrocket and force many to go without health care. Restoring these subsidies is Democrats’ main demand in the government shutdown battle
People across the country are just beginning to receive notices in the mail showing their premiums will double, or worse, next year. Republicans knew this was coming, but they either thought they could escape blame for it or they are so deluded they actually believe it’s what people want. As the shutdown moves into its second week, the consequences of their actions are starting to manifest.
We know this because Trump is once again parroting his old lines, telling NBC, “Obamacare has been a disaster for the people, so we want to have it fixed so it works.” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., wailed to the media, “Let me look right into the camera and tell you clearly: Republicans are the ones concerned about health care. Republicans are the party working around the clock to fix health care. We’re not — this is not talking points for us: We’ve done it.” He explained that the GOP has “lots of ideas” but they aren’t going to talk about them now because that’s for “the next three months,” presumably while they hash out the One Big Beautiful Budget.
If the party has any plans beyond raising premiums for Obamacare and slashing Medicaid to the bone, closing tons of rural hospitals, instituting irrational work requirements and denying care to millions of people, the place to look for some of their big ideas is Project 2025. Despite the fact that Trump denied he had anything to do with it, the Heritage Foundation manifesto has turned out to be the blueprint for his administration’s domestic policies. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, which bills itself as “a comprehensive, community-driven initiative to track the implementation” of the plan, the project is 48% complete.
But as nefariously creative as Project 2025 was, at least in the area of health care policy it is nothing more than the same warmed over calls for privatization and deregulation, both of which will make Americans’ lives worse.
The authors propose to force all Medicare patients into private Medicare Advantage plans by making it the default option, laying the groundwork to fully privatize Medicare. They want to remove consumer protections from all the private insurance plans that aren’t in the ACA marketplace. Those regulations are an underappreciated aspect of Obamacare, requiring all insurance companies to actually cover health care and not discriminate. They plan to open up the market to sell junk insurance plans which are worth virtually nothing.
Those are the proposals for which Johnson has vowed the GOP is working day and night. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, told Joe Perticone of the Bulwark that he didn’t think Republicans would move on the plans until after the 2026 midterms — a year from now — because Democrats need to be beaten s0 badly that they’ll “come to their senses” and agree to the half-baked measures.
But the GOP’s lack of strategy and success makes it clear the party is as flummoxed on this issue as they’ve always been, and they know it’s a loser for them. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has broken with the party to demand the Obamacare subsidies be extended. And when you’ve lost Marge, well…
Democrats have historically been in the driver’s seat when it comes to health care. Perennial polling shows them to be more trusted than Republicans on the issue, and for good reason. Democrats are responsible for the very existence of Medicare and Medicaid, and they have safeguarded the programs for decades of Republican attempts to take away people’s health insurance. According to polling on which party bears responsibility for the shutdown, most people see that the inane talking point that Democrats were demanding free health insurance for undocumented immigrants is an obvious lie, so much so that Republicans are dropping it. Word about Medicaid and the ACA premiums is starting to filter into the mainstream. For the first time in recent memory, headlines are proclaiming that “Republicans are in disarray” rather than Democrats.
This battle over health care is disorienting. It appears to be playing out like partisan skirmishes of the distant past — before a president was wrecking the federal government, treating the Department of Justice like his personal weapon of vengeance and sending masked agents into the streets to abduct and assault people. Even contemplating the fight in these terms risks normalizing all the corruption and abuse that’s taking place throughout our society at the hands of this administration. But it really isn’t.
Because this health care battle isn’t just about health insurance, which was the field on which the politics surrounding the issue have historically played out. Americans had faith that their actual health care, if they could afford it, would be good, and that while it had its flaws, the United States had a modern health system, comprehensive public health and world-class medical research. With the government’s shambolic response during the first year of the pandemic and the damage being done every day by the administration to our scientific research community, I suspect a lot of people are feeling insecure about their actual health care these days.
Let’s call it the RFK Jr. effect. With everything from cancer research being cancelled, to measles outbreaks and the president shouting from the podium in the White House “don’t take Tylenol!,” it’s very hard to have any confidence that this country has a functional health care system at all.
All of this has to be weighing on people’s minds as they assess the reasons for this government shutdown — even if they aren’t putting it all together quite that way. Health care policy in 2025 isn’t just a parochial “kitchen table issue.” It’s now on the front lines of this massive war against our social safety net. Because it’s an issue that people can immediately see and feel the effects of on their daily lives, Republicans have not yet found an effective way of answering the charges against them when it comes to damaging Obamacare and allowing premiums to soar.
If Democrats can find the fortitude to hold out for their demands, they will have taken the first step in reining in this lawless administration and given the American people something to hold onto in these dark days.
Salon
Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s own Wormtongue, does not have to “whisper lies into the ear of the old and demented sovereign,” as in the Tolkien classic. John Stoehr of The Editorial Board published a long Bluesky thread on Thursday on the Rasputin-like Trump adviser. “His Majesty Donald Trump” gets his information not via intelligence briefings but via TV. So Miller has made sure that he’s all over channels Trump watches, Stoehr writes, to deliver the poison that way.
With Miller’s help, Trump either believes or demands everyone else believe that blueish cities like Chicago and Portland are “war ravaged,” crime-ridden hellholes at risk of burning to the ground.
Trump and Miller need a bogieman to justify invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law. As with the phony intelligence Bush II deployed to justify the Iraq invasion, Trump 2.0 is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at its perceived enemies.
Trump’s entire cabinet is promoting the fiction that the anti-fascist non-organization known as Antifa is a “a radical terrorist organization that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the U.S. Government.” Trump homeland security chief, Kristi Noem, on Wednesday declared Antifa “just as dangerous” as “MS-13, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic State.” Even though some “black bloc” protesters * are on the ground in Portland and Chicago, attorneys for the city and state of Oregon cite police reports of only “8-15 people at any given time: ‘Mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around.’ ”
Death is too good for them, suggests Trump AG Pam Bondi:
To counter Trump-Miller’s apocalyptic narrative of American cities aflame and in chaos, late night’s Jimmy Kimmel invited viewers to counterpunch by posting their own videos:
“Trump and his buddies in the right-wing media are talking about Portland like its a scene from ‘The Last of Us’, when the reality is this is what these troops are being called in to stop,” Kimmel said, shortly before the late-night show displayed footage of demonstrators dancing to Farruko’s “Pepas” and Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” outside of the ICE facility.
A few protesters were also seen wearing inflatable animal costumes.
“If you live in Portland, Chicago, Memphis, D.C. — any of the cities where Trump is sending in the National Guard to protect you from squirrels, I don’t know — we want to see it,” Kimmel said before directing viewers to share videos of their “war-torn” communities while using the hashtag #ShowMeYourHellhole.
Viewers did. (I encourage those of you still on Twitter, a.k.a. X, to repost them liberally, and anywhere else they might find an audience.)
Now that Trump hasn’t received the Nobel play-pretty he demanded, brace for impact. He will be even more pissed that yet another federal judge refused his demand that reality bend to his will (Irish Times):
[O]n Thursday, US district judge April Perry temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deploying the national guard in Illinois, following more than two hours of arguments from lawyers for the federal government and the state of Illinois. The order took effect on Thursday and will remain in place for two weeks, with the judge reportedly saying she had “seen no credible evidence that there is a danger of a rebellion in the state of Illinois”.
Seriously, this is a propaganda war. Trump and Miller mean to win it as a pretext for launching a real one against you via the Insurrection Act. Take action. Public action. Online action. Mock the shit out of them.
* New York Times described the Antifa “look” in 2017:
By now, you know the look. Black work or military boots, pants, balaclavas or ski masks, gloves and jackets, North Face brand or otherwise. Gas masks, goggles and shields may be added as accessories, but the basics have stayed the same since the look’s inception.
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
50501
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
About María Corina Machado (BBC):
Venezuela’s opposition has for many years been notoriously divided and riven by infighting.
Leaders of different factions have often spent more time attacking each other’s strategies than attacking Nicolás Maduro, the man they are seeking to depose from power.
But María Corina Machado managed to unite those often bickering factions behind her ahead of last year’s presidential election.
Even after she was barred from running for the presidency, she succeeded in getting the opposition – and millions of Venezuelans – behind the little-known candidate which replaced her on the ballot, Edmundo González.
When the government-controlled National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner – even though tallies from the polling stations showed that González had won by a landslide – Machado did not give up.
She has been continuing to campaign from hiding and has refused to leave the country even though the Maduro government has repeatedly threatened her with arrest.
From the BBC minutes ago:
‘I am just one person. I certainly do not deserve this’ – Machado
The Nobel Committee has just released a video of when they informed Machado that she won the prize, a few minutes before it was announced to the world.
Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, becomes emotional and his voice breaks as he informs the Venezuelan politician of the news.
“Oh my God,” is the response. Machado says it five times, before saying: “I have no words.”
Machado thanks the committee, and says emotionally it’s the “achievement of a whole society”.
“I am just one person. I certainly do not deserve this.”
Machado says she thinks it will take a while to believe the news, and thanks them for the “honour” again, in an emotional voice.
The Nobel committee called Machado a woman “who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.” The Associated Press adds:
Machado went into hiding and has not been seen in public since January. A Venezuelan court issued an arrest warrant for González over the publication of election results. He went into exile in Spain and was granted asylum.
More than 800 people are in prison in Venezuela for political reasons, according to the human rights advocacy group Foro Penal. Among them is González’s son-in-law, Rafael Tudares, who was detained in January.
The White House is pissed. If you really must hear from White House’s communications director, Steven Cheung, here’s the link. Donald Trump will shriek, “Oh, what a world, what a world!” like the melting Wicked Witch about the unfairness of it all soon enough. Machado won’t be getting an invitation to the White House Christmas party.
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
50501
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
RFK Jr: "Somebody showed me a TikTok video of a pregnant woman at 8 months pregnant — she's an associate professor at the Columbia Medical School — and she is saying 'F Trump' and gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta. The level of Trump Derangement Syndrome has now… pic.twitter.com/8PjpjyNzIG
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2025
RFK Jr: “Somebody showed me a TikTok video of a pregnant woman at 8 months pregnant — she’s an associate professor at the Columbia Medical School — and she is saying ‘F Trump’ and gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta. The level of Trump Derangement Syndrome has now left the political landscape and is now a pathology.”
In her placenta? Hookay…
There’s more:
Aaaaand, more:
Nobody knows autism like Donald Trump.
Getting a COVID booster could save your life, even if you’ve had multiple prior infections and vaccinations. A study, published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that last season’s 2024–2025 mRNA COVID vaccines reduced people’s risk of emergency department visits by 29 percent, their risk of hospitalizations by 39 percent and their risk of death by 64 percent. Of the nearly 300,000 U.S. participants in the study, 35 percent received the Pfizer vaccine (COMIRNATY), and 64 percent received the Moderna vaccine (Spikevax). According to the study’s authors, COVID vaccination was effective in all age groups and “in persons with or without major chronic conditions.”
The research is in line with what scientists have seen in previous years. “The vaccine is efficacious, particularly against severe disease,” says Stanley Perlman, a coronavirus researcher and a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the study. And he and other experts expect the new 2025–2026 COVID vaccines’ performance will follow suit. The study’s authors declined to comment on the new findings.
The COVID vaccines’ effectiveness against symptomatic disease has generally waned since the first year they became widely available: the 2024–2025 shots offer 29 to 64 percent protection compared with the 94 percent protection given by the vaccines in 2019. This dip, however, is expected in a population with some prior immunity, Perlman says. Nisha Viswanathan, an internal medicine doctor and medical director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Long COVID program, who was not involved in the study, agrees that changes in immunity—and the subsequent response to the vaccines—were anticipated as more people were exposed to the COVID-causing virus, either through prior infection or vaccination.
The new research also “calls into question the idea that younger individuals and those without risk factors don’t need the vaccine,” Viswanathan says. Instead the data show that, while the shot is most effective for older individuals and those with comorbidities, “it was also protective in those without risk factors,” she says. Additionally, Viswanathan says that the study design made the evidence “more compelling” because the authors included enough women and younger individuals, which made the results more balanced and provided a fuller picture of vaccine effectiveness for all cohorts.
Get it if you can. Doctor Kennedy and Dr Trump are quacks.
This may be the scariest thing you’ll read all week:
Dominion Voting Systems — the voting machine behemoth that President Trump and his allies baselessly attacked after the 2020 election — has been sold to a Missouri-based company run by a former Republican election official, Axios has learned.
Dominion is one of the biggest election equipment providers and was used by 27 states during the 2024 election.
Liberty Vote purchased Canada-based Dominion for an undisclosed sum, according to a person familiar with the transaction.
Liberty is a new company owned by Scott Leiendecker, who in 2011 created a software program focused on enabling election workers to verify voters and check them in at polling locations.
According to Leiendecker’s LinkedIn page, his company KNOWiNK has more than 150 employees and $55 million in annual revenue.
The company says its systems are used by election officials in more than a third of U.S. states and describes itself as the “nation’s leading provider of electronic poll books.”
Leiendecker also has deep Republican connections.
Matt Blunt, who was then Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, appointed Leiendecker to a role investigating St. Louis’ elections administration after the 2000 election.
As governor, Blunt later appointed Leiendecker to be St. Louis’ Republican election director.
Ed Martin, a loyal Trump surrogate, was St. Louis’ Board of Elections’ chair when Leiendecker was the city’s election director.
This is not good.
I hate getting too hysterical about the election system.Local officials are still in charge and there’s no reason to suspect right now that they are going to cheat on Republicans’ behalf. My feeling has always been that Trump’s game plan is to contest the election after the fact and try to hold up the process or possibly even have his henchmen refuse to seat Democrats. But you never know. Regardless of anything else, having a right wing partisan owning voting machines is guaranteed to reduce the trust in the system even more than it already is.
That’s the creator of “The Wire.” I don’t think he needs any help from AI…
Sometimes what I read is so surreal I can’t believe I’m awake.
That’s the president of Colombia.
Hegseth ordered this latest hit and denies that Colombians were on the boat. But nobody in the administration has provided any intelligence to anyone that would prove any of these boats are filled with drugs, much less who the people in the boats are. Not that it makes a difference. Blowing up civilian boats on the high seas for any reason is called murder. It is illegal according to both U.S. and international law.
These actions shock me as much as the invasion of our cities by violent federal agents who are trying to provoke a reaction so Trump can invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. I know it sounds hysterical but I won’t be surprised if he tries to postpone elections.
They have no restraint here in the U.S or anywhere in the world.
