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‘No Credible Evidence’

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 10, 2025

Don’t let Trump win his propaganda war

“As you can see, there’s utter mayhem and chaos on the ground,” reports Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker from “war-torn” Chicago.

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:

#ShowMeYourHellhole

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.

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Nobel Peace Prize Goes To….

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 10, 2025

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado

María Corina Machado, a woman “who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.” Photo 2019 by Alexcocopro (CC BY 4.0).

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.

Yes, really.

Trump only really wanted to win the Nobel Peace Prize for one reason – and you guessed it: it’s Obama

OSLO—The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has recognized Donald Trump with a laser printed “certificate of participation.”“Deciding who will win the Peace Prize is an exhausting and stressful process,” the committee stated. “Donald Trump’s entry gave us many hours of welcome laughter.”

— The Borowitz Report (@borowitzreport.bsky.social) 2025-10-09T13:18:03.947Z

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RFK Jr, Genius

Published by digby on 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:

RFK JR: There are many other confirmations — there are two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-10-09T17:54:11.594Z

Nobody knows autism like Donald Trump.

Meanwhile:

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.

The Election Machines Are At Risk

Published by digby on October 9, 2025

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.

QOTD: David Simon

Published by digby on October 9, 2025

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.

About Those Venezuelan Drug Boats

Published by digby on October 9, 2025

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.

What An Ass

Published by digby on October 9, 2025

He’s always rude and he doesn’t listen to briefings so he probably didn’t know about this but still. What an appalling person:

President Donald Trump mocked transgender people in front of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose child identifies as nonbinary, during an Oval Office meeting in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that was intended to focus on trade relations but instead became a showcase of Trump’s familiar culture war politics.

The meeting, held in the presence of reporters, aimed to emphasize renewed cooperation between the two countries, which remain deeply economically intertwined. But as The Independent reported, it “devolved into a political rally disguised as a routine press availability.” Trump repeatedly veered off topic to attack Democrats, the media, and transgender people, boasting that under his leadership, “We have strong borders. We have no men in women’s sports. We’re not going to take your child away and change the sex of your child.”

He went on to claim that Democrats had left America “a dead country” plagued by “men playing in women’s sports and transgender for everybody and windmills all over the place.”

Carney, sitting beside him, did not respond publicly. The contrast was striking: Trump dominated the moment with bluster and provocation, while Carney, having been elected on the promise that he could handle Trump better than his predecessors, remained silent.

Maybe because if he said something it would blow up the relationship between the two countries. Any father in Carney’s position would be hard pressed not to slap Trump across the face:

Carney and his wife, British-Canadian economist Diana Fox Carney, have four children, one of whom identifies as nonbinary. In 2019, The New Haven Register profiled then-Yale student Sasha Carney, who used they/them pronouns and spoke about the relief of being recognized outside the gender binary when the university introduced a nonbinary gender marker.

Trump’s a pig.

Trump’s War On You

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 9, 2025

Is that a laser dot on your back?

What else is there to say? Trump 2.0 has declared war on anyone non-MAGA (CNN):

A remarkable scene unfolded in the White House State Dining Room on Wednesday as the Trump administration convened a group of independent journalists and online commentators to share stories of violence at the hands of Antifa, an anti-fascist movement with no leadership or organization.

President Donald Trump and top officials vowed to use the full weight of the federal government to bring down Antifa – comparing it to major gangs and drug cartels who they’ve attacked with the US military. They said they’d go after Antifa’s finances and designate it an “international” terrorist organization as they moved to dismantle it.

This is like Bush II’s “global war on terror,” or GWOT. No nation. No central command. TERROR is not an organization. Neither is the non-organization known as ANTIFA, short for anti-fascist. Antifa is Trump 2.0’s imaginary monster under the bed. Imaginary except that if they choose, you are in it.

But just as it was not an impediment for Bush II’s international anti-terror marauders, Antifa being a non-organization is no impediment to the second Trump administration. Trump 2.0 is reprising the Bush approach to brand anyone non-MAGA a potential target for summary execution by Hellfire missile fired from a drone. Trump’s attorney general suggested as much.

Attorney General Pamela Bondi compared the movement to the administration’s effort to target cartels.

“Fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets. It’s breaking down the organization brick by brick, just like we did with cartels. We’re going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa, destroy the entire organization, from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart,” Bondi said.

Mehdi Hasan noticed, “So he is going to drone strike American citizens?”

Sure, just so long as it’s captured on video. Good for ratings.

George Soros owes me so-o-o-o much back pay.

Trump’s use of “insurrectionists” above is no accident, Natasha Lennard argues at The Intercept:

… members of Trump’s Cabinet have repeatedly used the term “insurrection” and “insurrectionists” to describe the protesters standing up to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Gestapo-style operations. And Stephen Miller, the ghoulish architect of Trump’s deportation machine, described the Oregon judge’s ruling as “legal insurrection.”

Like an incantation, they call the notion of insurrection into being to justify the Insurrection Act’s invocation when no such justification exists in material reality.

“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, where Trump’s storm troopers already wreaking havoc in Chicago, said on Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”

It’s coming. The questions I have now are 1) What can we do to stop it? and 2) What do we do if we can’t?

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Unmaking America

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 9, 2025

How does MAGA hate thee? Let us count the ways.

Trump’s pet psychopath “glitches” when he realizes he’s said too much in public about Trump’s plans for martial law. TNR: “The clip has gone viral online, with many social media users speculating that there was no technical malfunction; Miller, they claim, had glitched out of panic, after accidentally revealing the authoritarian designs of the administration.”

The first time Donald John Trump took the presidential oath of office in January 2017, he swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, etc. As I watched I wondered how the career con man would manage to raise his right hand and place his left on a bible with his fingers crossed behind his back.

I kid. He simply lied in front of the entire planet. And did again in January 2025.

A Facebook post yesterday a from a woman with D.C. connections came to my attention. After a career “dedicated to preserving and strengthening democracy,” she is suspending her account. She recommends escaping social media algorithms to build local community as a means of rebuilding trust.

“It’s also how we figure out ways to govern ourselves going forward.”

I read “going forward” to mean (ominously) that she believes we might have to rebuild from scratch. I’ve been itemizing the ways Donald Trump and the MAGA Party are not making America great, but are working overtime to unmake it to the point that we’ll have to start again from scratch, if that’s even possible.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D) of Connecticut gave a speech this week laying out the Trump 2.0 battle plan for unmaking America. Before we get to that, the constitution Trump swore to protect (twice) is being shot through with holes by him and his Project 2025 lieutenants.

Let’s do a battle damage assessment in their Cold Civil War.

Since retaking office, Trump has usurped the constitutionally assigned powers of the Legislative Branch — specifically, “the power of the purse” — without a whimper from his MAGA allies there. The White House sees itself as a law unto itself and, as we saw this week with AG Pam Bondi, views congressional oversight with contempt.

Trump has treated the Judicial Branch alternately as a legal dodge and gnat he can swat away as it pleases him. He has defied court rulings including the unanimous 2024 NRA v. Vullo ruling. That case confirms that the First Amendment “prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech.” Yet Trump 2.0 has made threats against media outlets over content he doesn’t like. He has threatened colleges and universities over what they teach. Through paper-thin criminal cases brought against his perceived enemies “as part of his crusade for retribution,” through a flurry of executive orders targeting law firms, and through harassment lawsuits he brought personally against newspapers and media outlets, Trump has made a mockery of the judiciary.  

The convicted felon is stealing freedoms guaranteed to you in the Amendments as well. Trump 2.0 is systematically gutting rights guaranteed under the First Amendment (discussed above).

His immigration secret police now snatch immigrants and citizens off American streets without judicial warrants and without probable cause. They systematically violate people’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Once detained, immigrants and citizens alike are denied their due process rights under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Impacted by these unlawful actions are not only undocumented immigrants summarily deported, but also green card and visa holders who find them revoked without notice or court appeal.

Trump’s federalized deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, California alleges, violates state sovereignty guaranteed by the 10th Amendment. Illinois and Oregon also find their 10th Amendment protections in Trump’s sights.

His first day in office, Trump issued an executive order claiming the power (that belongs to Congress and state legislatures) to strike the birthright citizenship clause from the Fourteenth Amendment as if by royal decree. To date, that effort has failed.

But his second administration has stepped up efforts to denaturalize U.S. citizens protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Ohio Capitol Journal reports that “a recent Justice Department memo prioritizes national security cases, it directs the department to ‘maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence’ across 10 broad priority categories.”

The ACLU warns, “Under other administrations, those targeted for denaturalization were often Nazis and other war criminals trying to escape prosecution under assumed identities. Now, the administration is attempting to strip citizenship from individuals based upon old removal orders issued when an applicant did not appear, discrepancies in applications, and allegations of crimes that they had not even been charged with at the time of their naturalization.” A mere accusation of being a gang or cartel member can be enough under Trump 2.0.

Finally, through a lengthy menu of voting-related legislative and administrative gambits, Trump’s MAGA party has eaten away at states’ guarantee of a republican form of government under Article 4. 

God knows where they’ll turn next in redacting your constitutional rights.

Murphy this week outlined the plans behind Trump’s authoritarian takeover:

Step 3, you’ll notice, is to illegally deploy the U.S. military against U.S. citizens.

Step 5 is to rig election rules to concretize his control of government and to destroy your right to a republican form of government under Article 4 of the Constitution.

File away for future use. Twice this month I’ve been approached by youthful Trumpers sealioning me about why I oppose their boy king. Shut them down with this.

Robert Reich has a tighter list concluding with this. “Don’t give Trump what he wants.” Remain peaceful.

(h/t KY & CHS)

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Have you fought dictatorship today?

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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense