Sean Duffy: "People dress up like they're going to bed when they fly… We want to push people as we come into a really busy travel season, help people out, be in a good mood, dress up."pic.twitter.com/YT9ne8ylfh
— Feisty is proud to be a Democrat! (@FeistyLibLady) December 9, 2025
Dress in your good clothes and work up a sweat while you wait for your delayed flight. And when you are able to finally squeeze into a tiny seat like a sardine you can share your stench with your seatmates. That will totally improve the overall experience.
Airplane dress and airport exercise opportunities are the most important transportation issues facing us. Well, actually not. Philip Bump writes:
It remains the case that a good way to learn how people feel about things is to ask them. So you don’t have to simply assume, say, that people are hankering to work up a sweat before hopping onto a six-hour flight or that they think the central failure of the airline industry can be summarized as “sweatpants.” You can just contact a bunch of people over the phone and online and ask them to tell you what it is that they are concerned about.
Which is what YouGov did. And what they found is probably not surprising: The things that people find most annoying about flying are prices, delays and discomfort.
In fact, more than 6 in 10 Americans pointed to ticket prices as a major problem with flying. Half said the same of cramped seats, delays, hidden fees, and staffing shortages (which, of course, lead to delays). And waaaaaaaaaaay at the bottom of the list came “passengers dressing too casually,” which only 8 percent of respondents described as a major problem.
Nobody voted for what they’re selling.
I’m with this manosphere podcaster:
Tim Dillon: "Secretary Sean Duffy urges travelers to dress up and be in a good mood. Hey Sean, fuck you. Shut the fuck up. How about you get the planes in the fucking sky, you scumbag, and shut the fuck up?" pic.twitter.com/D7nkjecYac
Perhaps most worryingly for Trump, who’s become increasingly synonymous with his party, he’s slipped on issues that were major strengths. Just a few months ago, 53% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of crime, but that’s fallen to 43% in the new poll. There’s been a similar decline on immigration, from 49% approval in March to 38% now.
The new poll starkly illustrates how Trump has struggled to hold onto political wins since his return to office. Even border security — an issue on which his approval remains relatively high — has declined slightly in recent months.
Here’s what passes for good news for Trump according to the AP: his approval rating is at 36% which is just down from 42% since March, and this signals that Republicans are still largely behind him.
Still:
Republicans are more unhappy with Trump’s performance on the economy than they were in the first few months of his term. About 7 in 10 Republicans, 69%, approve of how Trump is handling the economy in the December poll, a decline from 78% in March.
They note that many more Democrats abandoned Joe Biden at the same point in his presidency which should put to rest this notion that Dems are just as irrationally partisan at the Republicans.
50% give him high marks on “border security” but they disagree with his approach to immigration generally:
Jim Rollins, an 82-year-old independent in Macon, Georgia, said he believes that when it comes to closing the border, Trump has done “a good job,” but he hopes the administration will rethink its mass deportation efforts.
“Taking people out of kindergarten, and people going home for Thanksgiving, taking them off a plane. If they are criminals, sure,” said Rollins, who said he supported Trump in his first election but not since then. “But the percentages — based on the government’s own statistics — say that they’re not criminals. They just didn’t register, and maybe they sneaked across the border, and they’ve been here for 15 years.”
And this is more than just deportations. They’re closing off legal immigration and making it impossible for people to come here if they don’t have a million dollars which, according to Howard Lutnick, means they are better people. (Hah!) Now they’re even going to destroy the tourist industry with this new draconian visa application for all foreigners demanding DNA, all social media user names and social contacts going back five years and the names and addresses of virtually everyone they know. It’s more stringent than an FBI background check.
I can guarantee that if they actually start doing this nobody’s going to come here unless they absolutely have to. There are Disneylands all over the world. Nobody voted for that.
About 3 in 10 U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling health care, down slightly from November. The new poll was conducted in early December, as Trump and Congress struggled to find a bipartisan deal for extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies that will expire at the end of this month.
That health care fight was also the source of the recent government shutdown. About one-third of U.S. adults, 35%, approve of how Trump is managing the federal government, down from 43% in March.
Keep him on the stump Susie Trump. People need to see him saying that they can believe him or their lyin’ eyes. The Democratic ads write themselves.
Trump said the other day at his rally that he wants more people from Norway or Denmark to come to American instead of all those shit hole countries.
Trump: I said, why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark? But we always take people from Somalia — places that are filthy, dirty, and disgusting.pic.twitter.com/vHA9jJ6L6I
A Danish intelligence agency has for the first time described the US as a potential security risk, signaling a shift in the Nordic country’s view of its close ally amid geopolitical frictions over Greenland.
The Danish Defense Intelligence Service — one of the two key espionage agencies in the Nordic nation — said the US is increasingly prioritizing its own interests and “now using its economic and technological strength as a tool of power, also toward allies and partners,” according to its 2025 intelligence outlook published Wednesday.
It also highlighted the US’s growing interest in Greenland, a territory of the Danish kingdom, as a result of heightened great-power rivalry in the Arctic.
The annual threat assessment of DDIS follows Donald Trump’s repeated suggestions he’d want to take control of Greenland, triggering diplomatic tensions between Copenhagen and Washington. The US president has also not ruled out taking the Arctic island using military force.
“The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies,” the agency said.
They are not wrong.
I totally get why people might think that it’s time for a reassessment of the United States providing so much of the global security umbrella. The world has changed and America spends massive sums of money to provide it. But I don’t know that anyone signed on for the U.S. to become a global threat. But here we are.
I don’t think I need to remind anyone that we are still in the nuclear age and creating this kind of instability, because of some incompetent freak’s wet dreams of power is shaping up to be one of the world’s greatest blunders.
When Donald Trump announced his first presidential bid in 2015, he was known to most Americans as the star of NBC’s “The Apprentice” whose catchphrase was “you’re fired!” He loved to say it on the stump with his trademark snarl and jabbing finger. He apparently even tried (unsuccessfully) to trademark the phrase during the reality show’s heyday in the mid-2000s. But as it turned out, even though he was a businessman in real life, Trump was actually unable to fire people in person. He instead delegated the unpleasant task to one of his lackeys, or simply made it known that he wanted the person to quit.
Staffing of the White House during the president’s first term was famously a constant state of chaos; the list of resignations and dismissals was a mile long. But as before, Trump rarely faced the people he was firing. FBI Director James Comey — whom Trump is currently attempting to put in prison — learned of his termination in May 2017 while watching cable news on a business trip to California. Trump never spoke to Comey personally, but he did order that the former director couldn’t travel back to Washington, D.C., on the FBI plane, forcing Comey to take a commercial flight. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, was informed that he was fired while in the bathroom. In 2017, White House chief of staff John Kelly was given the duty of firing communications director Anthony Scaramucci, adviser Steve Bannon and dozens of others, before being pushed out himself in December 2018.
The president’s second term has been different. Trump came into office with a new sense of what kind of people he wanted around him. He chose Cabinet officials and close advisers from the insufferable crowd of MAGA influencers, Fox News toadies and hardcore loyalists that have proved themselves to him over the course of the previous decade in the trenches. The Republican Senate majority was so cowed and docile that, with one notable exception — former GOP Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s nomination as attorney general — they confirmed even the most egregiously unqualified to the most important positions, people who just days before had been weekend talk show hosts or far-right podcasters.
There is no question in this administration what the requirements are: Tell Trump only what he wants to hear, slather him with praise at every opportunity and never, under any circumstances, disagree with anything he says.
So far this new approach has resulted in very little turnover. There have been a couple of instances where someone hasn’t worked out. But instead of firing them, he has taken to promoting people to different jobs. Michael Waltz, Trump’s first national security adviser, apparently wasn’t meshing well with the extremists in the Pentagon, so he was sent to New York as ambassador to the United Nations. The majority of Trump’s Cabinet officials and White House staff have survived quite well simply by willingly debasing themselves at every opportunity.
But as we approach the first anniversary of Trump’s second inauguration, rumblings of impending personnel changes are growing louder. Most are centered on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has produced the most scandals of any Trump appointee. His confirmation process was a trainwreck, with allegations of sexual assault, alcohol abuse and mismanagement of the only two small organizations he’d ever run. None of those issues were apparently deal breakers for his gig as a Fox News weekend host, but putting such a person in charge of the U.S. military made even some of the most radical GOP senators a bit queasy. They voted for him anyway, at least partially because he is popular with the MAGA base, and some were threatened with violence if they refused.
Hegseth’s tenure has been a real doozy. He’s spent most of his time carrying out an anti-woke crusade and barking about the new “warrior ethos” — even calling the senior brass to Washington to lecture them about it. But the scandals have been the biggest problem. First there was Signalgate, in which he shared classified war plans over a messaging application with senior national security staff — and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic. Last week, the Pentagon’s inspector general issued a report on the matter that was highly critical of Hegseth. But, in typical Trumpian fashion, the secretary claimed it completely exonerated him. Then there is the matter of his leadership in conducting the murderous policy in the Caribbean Sea against so-called narco-terrorists from Venezuela, which has Hegseth dancing on the head of a pin, trying to bask in the machismo of people being blown to bits without taking responsibility for making it happen.
The scuttlebutt is that he has an enemy in Vice President JD Vance, who has positioned his college buddy, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, to step into the job once Hegseth is shown the door. A Pentagon insider is even quoted as saying, “Whenever there’s an article that Hegseth is going to be fired, the next sentence is that Driscoll could replace him.” So far, Trump is sticking with Hegseth. But we know how far his loyalty goes. Driscoll is now deeply involved in the Ukraine talks, and Hegseth is looking over his shoulder.
Last week, the Bulwark broke the story, since confirmed by other outlets, that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is also on the chopping block. Some say that it’s because her consigliere, Corey Lewandowski, who rarely leaves her side and is said to be operating as co-secretary, has alienated everyone in the White House. The foreign junkets for Noem to show off her costumes and create footage for a potential presidential run in 2028 may not be a big hit either. Others claim it’s because Stephen Miller is unhappy that they haven’t been building grotesque immigrant camps more quickly. But the rumor is that Noem could be replaced by soon-to-be former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, which suggests that someone in the White House wants to put a more moderate face on the department rather than ratchet up the cruelty. Youngkin is not known as anyone’s idea of a firebrand.
The White House has denied all this, dismissing it as just more fake news. But Trump is in trouble, and when he’s in trouble he lashes out and blames anyone but himself, so we can expect to see the ax fall on quite a few heads over the next few months. Trump, though, won’t be the one to wield it. He’s much too cowardly to ever say “you’re fired!” to anyone’s face.
There are certainly serious matters to catch up on this morning, but the unseriousness ones are overwhelming them like an Executive Branch glioblastoma.
Federal prosecutors spent over a year working to extradite a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling more than $2 million in sensitive U.S. aviation equipment into Russia as it waged war on Ukraine.
But the case could fall apart because the defendant, Yana Leonova, is now at risk of being deported before going to trial.
Leonova faces a 10-count indictment from AG Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice for fraud, smuggling and money-laundering. Oh, and an immigration detainer from Secretary Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security. ICE wants to deport Lenova to Belarus if she’s released from a D.C. jail. She was only approved for a two-week stay in the U.S.
A federal magistrate judge called the situation “Kafkaesque” at a hearing in U.S. District Court in D.C. on Monday, and said in a written order that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s push to increase deportations on orders from President Donald Trump appeared to be wreaking havoc on a complex international prosecution that had been tied up for a year in extradition proceedings.
“Indeed, it is both preposterous and offensive for the government to bring someone into the United States against their will and then turn around and seek ICE detention because that person is here ‘illegally,’” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said in the written order. “The government needs to decide what its priorities are: ginning up deportation stats or prosecuting alleged criminals.”
If Kafka were alive, he might be an advisor to the Trump White House.
AI is freaking me out. AI-generated fake stories and videos are flooding the Net. The boundaries between fact and fiction are dissolving like that cake left out in the rain.
View on Threads
You can’t trust any videos or stories posted from random accounts without backing up to see if they are as phony as Pete Hegseth.
Secretary Hegseth’s Department of Defense is all in on AI. And just in time for it to screw with him (The New Republic):
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled his department’s new AI chatbot for military personnel, GenAI.mil. Almost immediately, the bot called a “hypothetical” situation where the government orders a strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat and then double-taps said boat to kill the survivors, “unambiguously illegal.”
A military source who spoke to Straight Arrow News Wednesday pointed reporters to a Reddit thread that featured the alleged interaction with the bot. The source said that military personnel wasted no time in testing the bot’s capabilities.
“At least someone—or something?—in the Trump administration has moral clarity,” writes TNR’s Rachel Kahn.
But who the hell is Straight Arrow News and is that image from Reddit real? SAN claims an unnamed source gave a similar prompt to GenAI.mil and got the same response. The Pentagon Press Operations had no comment as of Tuesday, so AI has not take over there yet. They’re probably overwhelmed with trying to cover Hegseth’s ass over the murder of helpless survivors of his first missile attack on their boat.
This AP headline above looks like something from The Onion. But it’s not:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomatic correspondence to stop using the Calibri font and return to the more traditional Times New Roman effective Wednesday, reversing a Biden administration shift to the less formal typeface that he called wasteful, confusing and unbefitting the dignity of U.S. government documents.
“Typography shapes how official documents are perceived in terms of cohesion, professionalism and formality,” Rubio said in a cable sent to all U.S. embassies and consulates abroad Tuesday.
In it, he said the 2023 shift to the sans serif Calibri font emerged from misguided diversity, equity and inclusion policies pursued by his predecessor, Antony Blinken. Rubio ordered an immediate return to Times New Roman, which had been among the standard fonts mandated by previous administrations.
Times New Roman is simply more dignified, Rubio’s memo argues.
“Aligning the Department’s practice with this standard ensures our communications reflect the same dignity, consistency, and formality expected in official government correspondence.” “Dignity” appears mutliple times in the memo.
Rubio attends Cabinet meetings where a president with an epic comb over and orange tanner expects him and others to lick his boots while he nods before returning to an office he redecorated to look like a bordello.
ABC News leads its report, tongue firmly in cheek, with “There’s a new serif in town!” The memo requires official State documents printed in 14-point font. If that’s to make them easier to read, isn’t that just the “accessibility” Rubio’s memo decries?
Image via State Department.
“So, to restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface.”
Nothing says Trump like decorum and professionalism.
I’m not sure why, but they scheduled that “rally” at a ballroom at a casino in the Poconos. I don’t think there were more than 300 people there. Weird…
At the start of Donald Trump’s first presidency, in 2017, large Democratic victories in New Jersey and Virginia, paired with overperformances in special elections, foreshadowed the blue wave of the 2018 midterms. Eight years later, Trump’s return to power has been followed by similar Republican setbacks, including Democrats’ sweep of all 13 statewide elections that took place this November, plus myriad gains for local offices.
Now, with this year’s contests nearly all completed after Tuesday, which saw Democrats stage an upset and flip a state House seat in Georgia, the extent to which the GOP struggled in legislative races has also come into view.
Democrats, buoyed by Trump’s unpopularity and a fired-up base, flipped 21 percent of all the GOP-held seats that were on the ballot throughout 2025.
According to Bolts’ analysis, Democrats gained 25 state Senate and House seats that were held by the GOP, out of the 118 that were resolved this year in regular or special elections.
The swing is even stronger than in 2017, when Democrats flipped 20 percent of all GOP-held legislative seats up for election, per Bolts’ review of data compiled at the time by elections websites Ballotpedia and The Downballot.
Among their 2025 gains, Democrats have secured their largest majority in the Virginia House since the 1980s, expanded their control of the New Jersey Assembly, and broken Republican supermajorities in the state senates of Iowa and Mississippi. They also flipped a state Senate seat in a deeply Republican region of Pennsylvania, and staged Tuesday’s upset in a Georgia district that Trump had carried by double-digits last year.
Meanwhile, Republicans failed to flip any legislative seats this year, losing ground even in New Jersey, where they had high hopes, and failing to gain several districts in New York State that Trump carried last year. (The GOP did manage to flip a handful of seats in 2017.)
I’m not in the prediction business so I have no idea what will happen. But the signs are all very positive that people are seeing Trump and his henchmen’s destruction of our country and they are coming out in large numbers to curb their power.
Even Trump seems resigned:
Q: Are you worried at all about the Democrats winning yesterday in Miami and Georgia?
Trump: I don't worry about it. For whatever reason, when you win the presidency, you seem to lose the midterms, even if you win the presidency by a lot and you do a great job as president. It… pic.twitter.com/sLdZ39xKqg
It then outlines plans to punish such offenses “to the maximum extent permitted by law.”
The new orders create a massive dragnet that focuses on Antifa but Bondi draws an extraordinarily wide circle of groups and individuals who challenge MAGA. It was first reported by Ken Klippenstein, but has not yet received a fraction of the coverage it deserves.
Bondi’s memo says it targets domestic terrorism. But the focus is exhaustively — almost singularly — on ideology. The memo’s language essentially builds a composite culture war enemy.Although the directive mentions the statutory definition requiring acts dangerous to human life, it directs federal law enforcement to investigate individuals whose “animating principle is adherence” to several viewpoints.
And the “extreme viewpoints” and ideological frameworks the Attorney General instructs federal law enforcement to prioritize include? (These are direct quotes)
• Opposition to law and immigration enforcement…
• Extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders…
• Adherence to radical gender ideology…
• Anti-Americanism…
• Anti-capitalism…
• Anti-Christianity…
• Support for the overthrow of the United States Government…
• Hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality,,,
To which the proper reaction is WTAF? How is an FBI agent supposed to measure hostility towards traditional views on family? And what does that even mean? Are they monitoring your social media, who you donate to? Who you are sleeping with? The criteria are so vague, they invite subjective interpretation and mission creep.
Critics are right when they warn that this will end up targeting views that are constitutionally protected. And that may be the whole point.
He points out that Bondi’s order exclusively targets the left despite the fact that the data show most of the threats of political violence are generated by the right (which they have actively suppressed.)
So groups or individuals who advocate for immigration reform, or trans rights, or are opposed to capitalism can now be slotted into this internal network mapping apparatus just based on their beliefs.
But this is what I try to emphasize in today’s podcast:You don’t need to get a conviction, or even actually file a case to chill dissent.
If you scare away donors by suggesting the groups are under investigation for tax fraud or, terrorism. You cripple the organizations whether or not any charges are ever even filed.
I don’t mind saying that I think about it. I don’t censor myself and have for many years tried not to be too incontinent in my speech. But I’d be an idiot not to consider if I might come into the cross hairs. Not being a wealthy person it’s fairly intimidating to consider that what I have always considered to be my fundamental, bedrock right to free speech under the constitution could be the end of me.
You don’t have to be a blogger or columnist to be in this position. It could happen to any of us. If you’re on Facebook or Instagram, BlueSky or X you too could come up in some new AI data dragnet. But it’s important not to allow them to make us obey in advance by dropping out of the dialog. We’re not lost yet but we will be if we allow ourselves to be silenced. There is safety in numbers.
This from Sen. Chris Murphy is worth watching. He’s not wrong:
I need you to listen to and share this story – of how Trump is preparing to abandon Ukraine in exchange for Russian money for his billionaire friends.
It could be the greatest corruption of American foreign policy in our history. Russia gets Ukraine. Trump's friends get rich. pic.twitter.com/yqj2cAQZdx
Trump will sell this as the greatest peace deal the world has ever known, bringing in trillions and trillions of dollars to the United States. As Murphy says, this is all nonsense. It’s about giving billions to Trump’s rich family and buddies which, in fairness, to him is the same as “bringing it back” home. After all, l’etat, c’est moi.
The corruption is on an epic scale never seen before in America and I didn’t think there was anything we hadn’t seen before. Compared to these guys, the robber baron’s were a bunch of deadbeat losers.
