Bill Browder, a man who knows a thing or two about Putin’s Russia, shares this analysis of what’s really going on with the so-called “peace plan”:
Putin Meets With Witkoff and Kushner for Nearly Five Hours and the two sides did not reach any specific compromises, an aide to President Vladimir V. Putin said, as the United States pushes a plan to end the war in Ukraine. Let me translate for you what this means.
There was never any intention from Russia to settle this conflict (even when they released their 28 point “peace plan”).
This whole thing has been a well executed intelligence operation with two very specific objectives: 1) to derail the devastating oil sanctions that Senator Lindsay Graham has tee’d up and 2) to derail the EU plan to transfer the Russian frozen assets to Ukraine. As a result of these so called “peace negotiations” both of these serious consequences have been kicked into the long grass.
Putin is happy and Trump will say “we can’t impose sanctions on Russia while we’re trying to get peace”. And he will lean heavily on the EU to not confiscate the frozen assets so they don’t “derail these productive negotiations”.
For anyone who understands what Russia cares about, this whole thing is so obvious. It’s a shame we let ourselves get played by Putin. Most importantly, the Russian terrorism against innocent Ukrainians will continue.
Is that true? Who knows? But I wouldn’t surprised. Sure Trump, Witkoff and Kushner all have dollar signs and Nobel Prizes in their eyes and maybe they’ll be able to pull this off. But there’s a good chance that Putin is playing all of them and is buying time for his own purposes. We know one thing. He does not want peace. That’s just ludicrous. I really doubt that he’s driven by the idea of going into business with Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. He could have done that without going to this much trouble.He wants Ukraine and beyond.
Trump keeps saying that he can void all of Joe Biden’s pardons.
Obviously, this is not true and it has nothing to do with whether or not Biden signed the documents with an autopen which, by the way, is perfectly legitimate. It’s because Trump simply does not have the authority to void a previous president’s pardons.
It’s too bad, really, because it would be nice if a future president could void all the pardons Trump is giving and is planning to give to his criminal family, friends, cronies and accomplices. Perhaps he should give a moment’s thought to that.
I’m sure this is just schtick. He knows he can’t do it. So why does he persist in saying it? (This is not the first time he’s made this “declaration.” ) I suspect it’s just a form of mental masturbation, giving himself a thrill by issuing royal orders against the man he loves to blame for all of his own failures. The question is why so few of his followers, especially the officials in Washington, have had even the slightest objections or concerns about having a person of such low character, psychological impairment and compromised intelligence running the country. My conclusion after all this time is that they must be exactly the same way. And that means tens of millions of our fellow Americans are as well.
Getting Trump off the stage won’t solve that problem, I’m afraid.
Babies and kids are going to die because Trump made one of his awesome “deals” with Bobby Jr to win the presidency. His deals usually end up hurting people so no surprise there.
Kirk Milhoan — a pediatric cardiologist and church pastor tapped by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — will preside over the committee later this week as it considers key changes to the national childhood vaccine schedule. He replaces Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician who stepped down this week to take on the role of chief science officer at HHS.
At meetings on Thursday and Friday, the committee will consider a slate of changes to the CDC’s current vaccine schedule, including whether to continue its recommendation that infants receive a hepatitis B shot at birth — a vaccine that has prevented hundreds of thousands of childhood infections. Experts warn that without the birth dose, hepatitis B will infect thousands of babies again each year. Most infected infants will develop chronic infection and 1 in 4 of those are at risk to die from chronic liver disease as adults.
It wasn’t immediately clear what other changes the panel would be considering this week, or how Milhoan might affect those decisions. Milhoan told The Washington Post the committee planned to examine whether the childhood immunization schedule — and specifically aluminum salts in vaccines (a safe adjuvant that triggers an immune response) — could be causing increases in allergies and autoimmune disorders, a claim with little support that anti-vaccine activists have long touted.
[…]
“We have to say it out loud, this was a bioterror weapon,” Milhoan said of Covid in remarks before a Texas church congregation in October. “I believe what it was, it was actually a test release in Wuhan. And then there were people in Italy and there’s an exchange between Wuhan and Italy. And then it got transferred there and then it went, slowly, as respiratory viruses do, across the way. So from a medical standpoint, it was and the U.S. has to own this, because they funded it all.”
In the same remarks — first reported by Endpoints News — Milhoan compared vaccination efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic to the Holocaust and called mRNA technology “the biggest threat to humanity.” He also cautioned audience members against trusting public health experts, suggested vaccines cause miscarriages, and characterized the CDC as having blood on its hands.
This “pastor” skipped big parts of the Bible like most right wingers who call themselves Christians. He’s a nutcase, obviously. But he’s hostile to vaccines so Bobby’s putting him in charge of the vaccine recommendations.
I assume that most doctors will ignore anything coming out of the government health agencies for the duration of the regime. But the damage is going to be severe for a long time to come.
🚨 CNBC on latest jobs numbers: "A big miss on the ADP payrolls. The private payroll company saying private payrolls shed 32,000 workers in November. That's the fourth negative number in the past six months. The estimate was for plus 40,000, so the street was off on this one …… pic.twitter.com/KaQw8P36K8
US private employers lost 32,000 positions in November, with job creation seemingly locked in a standstill, according to the private payroll processor ADP.
The firm’s revised data showed a gain of 47,000 jobs in October, coming off losses in September and August. Job creation has essentially been flat in the second half of this year, ADP said, and small businesses in particular appeared to struggle in November.
“Hiring has been choppy of late as employers weather cautious consumers and an uncertain macroeconomic environment,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said in a statement. “And while November’s slowdown was broad-based, it was led by a pullback among small businesses.”
About 46% of all US employees work for small businesses, according to government data.
Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) takes up the Pete Hegseth war crime story with this observation:
Twenty-eight paragraphs into the story that first focused attention on the murder Pete Hegseth ordered back in September (though as it notes, Nick Turse first revealed the second shot just days after the attack) is this revelation: it took four strikes to kill first the people then destroy any debris from the targeted boats.
The boat in the first strike was hit a total of four times, twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it, four people familiar with the operation said.
It took the most powerful military in the history of the world four shots the get the job done.
The first strike meant to destroy the boat and kill the crew. The second was intended to murder survivors in the water. The last two were supposed to send remaining evidence to the bottom of the sea.
Hegseth also clarified his earlier comments about watching the attack live.
“As you can imagine, the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs,” he said. “So I moved on to my next meeting. A couple of hours later, I learned that the commander had made the — which he had the complete authority to do.”
“Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat, and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back,” Hegseth added.
I suggested yesterday that if one were to conceive a plan for reducing the world’s last superpower and guarantor of world peace to a laughingstock, it would not look any different from Trump 2.0.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
Wheeler writes this morning about the idiocracy those four shots reveal:
That fact lies at the core of a whole bunch of other senselessness about Trump’s feckless rule. There’s Trump’s release of Juan Orlando Hernández, a proven high-level threat, even as forces that normally prevent turbulence in the Middle East gather off of Venezuela’s oil fields. There’s the many ways, starting with the destruction of USAID and definitely including Trump’s trade war, that has added to global instability. There’s the cost involved in drone-striking small boats. There’s the neutering of legal advisors who might have saved Admiral Frank Bradley from being underbussed by the guy who promoted him. There’s the pretend press corps filled with nutballs and cranks that ensures that Whiskey Pete will never be challenged with actual knowledge.
But at root, you’ve got Pete Hegseth sitting atop that most powerful military boom boom boom boom, treating it like a children’s game.
CNN with a useful timeline of all the bullshit Trump and his minions have said abt the September 2 strike.edition.cnn.com/2025/12/03/p…
Democrat Aftyn Behn did not upset Republican Matt Van Epps in Tennessee’s 7th district special election on Tuesday. That does not mean Republicans won’t be upset. Donald Trump won the deep-red district in 2024 by 22 points. Epps held it by only nine even after his party and its leaders spent and campaigned heavily. A 13-point slide.
Ed Kilgore writes that Democrats weighed in for Behn as well:
Democrats heavily backed Behn financially as well. What distinguished this progressive activist from the usual red-district Democrat is that she didn’t have the usual protective coloration of cultural traditionalism or ideological moderation. She campaigned in this southern-fried district with AOC and DNC chairman Ken Martin, and Kamala Harris made her first post-2024 campaign appearance at a GOTV event aimed at helping the candidate. Even Al Gore pitched in. But reputation aside, Behn ran on the same affordability themes that progressive and centrists alike have been embracing, in yet another trial heat for the 2026 midterms. She probably benefited somewhat from frigid election day weather; Democrats were more likely than Republicans to vote early. Overall turnout was exceptionally high for an off-year special election.
“But the relatively tight margin in such a deep-red district nonetheless represents a warning shot about the party’s vulnerabilities heading into the 2026 midterm elections,” The New York Times observes regarding a district drawn to elect Republicans.
A 13-point shift may seem extraordinary or jaw-dropping. For Republicans this year, it’s simply the norm. Heading into Tuesday night, Republicans had underperformed Mr. Trump’s showing by an average of 13 points across dozens of state and federal special elections. And while the Republican Party’s problem in special elections is particularly pronounced — in part because Democrats enjoy a major advantage among the most motivated voters — this basic story isn’t new. It has played out for every president over the last two decades.
Cohn observes that the winning presidential candidate’s party has gone on to lose “each of the next five midterms — and four of the next five presidential elections.” Trump’s slide, Cohn believes, is because “like other recent presidents” he has pushed “too far in pursuit of an ideological agenda.” But considering Barack Obama and Joe Biden spent much of their presidencies cleaning up economic messes left over from the prior Republican administrations, it’s not clear what immoderate ideologoical agendas Cohn sees behind Democratic losses during their midterms.
The always upbeat Simon Rosenberg sees the narrowed gap in TN-07 as portending good things for Democrats in 2026:
It is clear now that the national playing field has tilted significantly towards the Dems. We’ve seen it in special elections across the country this year; in the blowout November elections; and now tonight in deep red TN-7. There are 40 House seats held by Republicans who won by 12 points or less, and a double digit point shift in the national map would make the AK, IA, OH and TX Senate races competitive and put the Senate in play.
2026 is clearly shaping up to be a year of opportunity for us and for the pro-democracy movement.
the avg special swing for special elections in the 2026 cycle is 13 points to the left, according to The Downballot — so we are seeing an above average shift here in TN-07, even with Trump's late intervention docs.google.com/spreadsheets…
Affordability continues to be a buzzword candidates and the press use as shorthand for the anxiety Americans feel in an economy wracked by a widening gulf between the elite and the rest. I wish Democrats would drop it. “Affordability” speaks to people’s heads when what people feel is more important. The term lacks — What was it Bruce Lee said to his student in Enter the Dragon? — emotional content.
“Don’t think. FEEL! It is like a finger pointing away to the moon.”
Let Trump rail about affordability. It means he’s losing.
Trump: "There's this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about — 'affordability.' They just say the word. It doesn't mean anything to anybody. They just say it. 'Affordability.' I inherited the worst inflation in history … the word 'affordability' is a con job by the Democrats"
President Donald Trump argued Tuesday that former special counsel Jack Smith’s final report — chronicling the criminal case against him for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago — should never be made public.
Trump urged U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in a new court filing to extend her 11-month-old order blocking the Justice Department from releasing the full report, which Smith submitted shortly before Trump’s second inauguration.
Anything less, his attorney Kendra Wharton wrote, would “perpetuate Jack Smith’s unlawful criminal investigations and proceedings.”
Trump’s request is a break from the Justice Department’s handling of all special counsel reports in recent decades. Typically, those reports are provided to Congress and made public, even when they have included damaging findings about the incumbent administration. DOJ released another report Smith compiled detailing his findings about Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election shortly before President Joe Biden left office.
Trump’s effort could complicate efforts by congressional Republicans to grill Smith about the substance of his investigation. Cannon’s order bars the Justice Department from disseminating the results of its investigation to outsiders, including Congress. While Smith’s final classified documents report remains under seal, he may not have authority to discuss its findings with lawmakers.
I’m quite confident that Cannon will keep those files under wraps. She has Supreme Court stars in her eyes.
This is yet another cover-up, just like Epstein. Trump knows what he did and he knows that if people are reminded of the details they will see him for the criminal he is. I don’t know if they can just destroy the files but if they can they will. I’ll be shocked if we ever see this report.
Tonight’s Tennessee special election is not expected to go to the Democrat. It’s a Trump +22 district. But judging by the Republican panic, they are terrified that the margin is going to be embarrassing enough that the Democratic roll in these elections will be validated again, and in a deep red state. (If the Democrat actually pulls it off it would be an earthquake.) It calls their redistricting scheme into question as well because they have deliberately lowered their margins in a number of districts in order to eliminate Democratic representation. If there really is a blue wave forming that might not work out so well.
As always, Bolts is the place to go to see what we have in store among the states tonight and for the rest of the month:
Trump passed the buck to Hegseth, saying : “As far as the attack is concerned, I still haven’t gotten a lot of information because I rely on Pete. I didn’t know about the second strike. I wasn’t involved in it.”
Pete came out swinging:
Q: So you didn't see any survivors after that first strike?
HEGSETH: I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don't understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices and plant fake stories in the… pic.twitter.com/XjhqWw9GVh
Q: So you didn’t see any survivors after that first strike?
HEGSETH: I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices and plant fake stories in the Washington Post
Hegseth: "I watched that first strike live. As you can image at the Dept of War, we've got a lot of things to do. So I didn't stick around for the hour to two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive sight exploitation digitally occurs. I moved on to my next meeting. A couple… pic.twitter.com/PuD0kjkLs2
Hegseth’s avoiding responsibility for the second strike and it’s unclear if Trump is going to stick with him or not. He sat next to him and seemed to support him as he went on and on declaring America’s intention to keep killing and killing “putting them at the bottom of the ocean” because Joe Biden handled them with kid gloves but they are real men with huge swinging egos. And Trump himself said they are going to strike on land because “it’s easier.”
I keep wondering … who’s going to stop them?
That circle jerk cabinet meeting was even worse than usual with Kristi Noem even thanking him for stopping hurricanes this season. I’m not kidding. We are so far down the rabbit hole, friends.
