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.
Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, on Tuesday criticized the Trump administration for its elimination of wind energy projects across the country.
In one of his first executive orders earlier this year, President Donald Trump directed a federal review of existing onshore and offshore wind projects to determine whether their leases should be terminated or amended. Under the directive, the Trump administration canceled wind energy projects across the country and stopped issuing new leases.
“You cannot weaponize these things and just for political purposes put your thumb on the scale,” Stitt said while speaking at Semafor’s “Powering America’s Future” event.
Stitt’s comments come after a federal judge on Monday ruled Trump’s order unlawful.
Wind power is one of Trump’s most personal bête noirs. He is going to be very unhappy about this.
Yet another Republican expressing opposition to Trump. It’s not much. Baby steps. But coming from an oil patch governor it’s especially notable.
It’s not enough that he’s destroying small importers and raising prices. Let’s destroy the tourist business too!
This is utter lunacy. He truly is declaring war on Europe. But any money laundering, drug runner or middle eastern despot is welcome to come to America as long as they give Trump a big slurpy kiss.
Mayor-elect of Miami, Eileen Higgins (D). (Public domain.)
If you are not in the habit of supporting non-federal downballot candidates, get in the habit. The election of Democratic governors in New Jersey and Virginia were harbingers of the 2026 wave that’s coming. More arrived last night (The Guardian):
Democrat Eileen Higgins was elected mayor of Miami on Tuesday night in a stunning upset victory that reversed a run of recent Republican successes in Florida.
The election of Higgins, 61, a former county commissioner, also added to a string of Democratic wins across the country that have served to highlight the growing level of resistance to Donald Trump in his second presidential term.
Miami-Dade, a county with a significant immigrant population, voted for Trump in historic numbers in 2024, making him the first Republican presidential candidate to win it since 1988.
That majority melted away in Tuesday’s run-off as Higgins became the first Democrat in 30 years to become mayor of the city of Miami. After winning 36% of the vote in last month’s election after which the top two candidates moved forward, she bested Republican Emilio González, a former city manager.
Meanwhile, Democrat Eric Gisler narrowly defeated Republican Mack Guest IV in a special election in the 121st state house district of Georgia. The district had been held by a Republican state legislator, and Trump carried it in 2024 by 12 points. Guest outraised Gisler, and was endorsed by the popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. But he couldn’t survive the anti-Republican wave.
Mother Jones reminds readers who might have missed last month’s other Democratic advances:
In Virginia, Democratic challengers flipped 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, to secure their largest majority in the chamber in four decades. New Jersey Democrats grew their margin in the assembly by five seats—winning their largest majority since Watergate. Coupled with the party’s string of upset victories and double-digit shifts in special elections last year, the results have some party leaders dreaming big.
How big? A new post-election analysis from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports Democratic candidates in statehouse races, argues that the current electoral climate presents the best chance in years for Democrats to consolidate power in blue states, flip battleground chambers, and loosen Republicans’ grip on power in solidly red states like South Carolina and Missouri.
By the group’s calculations, Democratic candidates over-performed the partisan leaning of their districts this fall by an average of 4.5 points—a shift that would put as many as 651 state legislative seats in play across the country in a midterm election year, and position the party for a bit of long-awaited payback.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” said DLCC president Heather Williams. While the November results have many Democrats talking enthusiastically about a repeat of the 2018 blue wave, Williams goes back further: “We are looking at the makings of an environment that looks more like 2010 in reverse.”
Listen, the Republican 2010 victories in NC set us up for a decade of redistricting, redistricting again, and redistricting some more. Plus repeated legal fights over vote suppression legislation. Plus a battle that lasted until May to secure a state Supreme Court seat Justice Allison Riggs won last November. We have yet to recover.
The president, in the words of an old TV commercial, is a chocolate mess. He held a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday backed by a banner reading “Lower Prices Bigger Paychecks.” He was there to connect with Americans seeing higher prices on every grocery store aisle and paychecks that haven’t increased and buy less. Instead he bragged that he’s ended inflation and lowered prices. One could say he lost the plot but it was never his plot:
He mocked the word “affordability,” touted how high the stock market had risen, and said Americans didn’t need so many pencils. He launched into a number of digressions to disparage the country of Somalia, the concept of climate change and the news media in the back of the room.
It’s a lesson Americans have been slow to learn. Don’t listen to what Trump says, watch what he does.
He hates neoconservatives, Adam Serwer lays out in The Atlantic. He’s mocked them and their mismanagement of military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan, “though more in the tone of a fan angry about his team losing than of a principled opponent of militarism.”
Now with respect to his project for regime change in Venezuela, Trump is running the neocon playbook.
Like the neocons, Trump’s neo-neocons repeatedly invoke the West’s complacency and unwillingness to defend its own values, a frailty that can be rectified only through the ritual use of military force against weaker targets. The conservative writer Jonah Goldberg once articulated what he called the “Ledeen Doctrine,” after the neoconservative Michael Ledeen, which was: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Despite Trump’s rejection of George W. Bush, MAGA bears many similarities to the right-wing politics of that era—a fetishization of violence and torture, the treatment of opposition as treasonous, a disdain for due process, and an anti-Muslim bigotry at odds with fundamental American principles.
But not at odds with what for Trump passes for principles. More like a schoolyard bully’s need for domination.
Although the pretense of adhering to democratic values has been abandoned by an administration that disdains democracy, free speech, and the rule of law, the theory is nonetheless the same: Unless America defends ethno-nationalism against the forces of multiracial democracy elsewhere, ethno-nationalism will not be safe here. The Trump administration’s rabid hostility toward the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa, with its history all Americans can recognize, makes more sense in this context.
Some neocons actually believed in democratic principles, Serwer suggests, albeit “in their own misguided way.” Some of those became Never Trumpers. “But for others, the appeal of interventionism seems to have been more about a kind of ethnic chauvinism, about reiterating the superiority of the enlightened West over primitivist ‘Islamofascism.’ For that faction of former neocons, well, Trumpism fit like a well-tailored suit.”
Despite his condemnation of the neocons, what Trump really condemns are their failures. Their failure to subdue Iraq and Afghanistan (and Syria) overnight, as he would have, and to take their oil. (Venezuela has lots of oil.) Trumpism means not only to nurture ethnic chauvinism at home but to export it the way the neocons did, minus the pretext of exporting democracy.
Serwer wraps up:
The Trump administration’s strategy document states that “who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” Trump has made clear that this is no anodyne statement—at a rally Tuesday he defended his “permanent pause” on “third-world migration” by expressing his dismay at the fact that instead of people coming from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, immigrants were coming to the U.S. from “Somalia, places that are a disaster, filthy, dirty, disgusting.” Trump is not concerned about “migration”; in some general sense, he’s concerned that the immigrants are not white.
This is the “Great Replacement” theory, applied globally. It is the same might-makes-right worldview of the worst neocons, but in service of the abhorrent principle of segregation instead of democracy, and suggesting a future of American imperialism unmoored from any pretense of a belief in the equality of mankind.
Trump the Incurious may have a deep preference for the skin tones (genes) of Nordic peoples. But he will never ask himself why more of them don’t want to join an American oligarcy in decline. They are happier in the social democracies they’ve built than they would be in the Trump-Miller-Vought white-nationalist project.
