The reason that Republicans always say Democrats cheated when they win is because it’s what they do:
Former Republican state legislator Austin Smith pleaded guilty Monday to what he previously called “ludicrous” charges that he personally forged more than 100 signatures on his petitions for reelection last year.
The Republican from Surprise was a member of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, which has a history of spreading false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and pushed for election law changes in the state legislature.
“As a part of his guilty plea today, Smith admitted signing the name of a deceased woman on one of his candidate nomination petitions in March of 2024,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement. “He also admitted that he attempted to deceive the Secretary of State’s Office by knowingly filing petitions containing forged signatures of purported supporters of his nomination for the Republican primary for State Representative from LD 29.”
And check this out:
At the time he was indicted, Smith was strategic director of Turning Point Action, Turning Point USA’s advocacy arm. TPUSA is a far-right organization based in Phoenix that aims to mobilize young conservatives founded by Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed in September while speaking to a group of college students in Utah.
Shhhh. Don’t even think anything rude about Turning Point Action or you’ll lose your job and be run out of town.
Bolts.com makes a point I don’t think many of us have fully grasped — if the Supreme Court does what we think it will do when it finally guts the Voting Rights Act, the consequences won’t just be for the loss of Black representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. The negative consequences will be much more profound on the state and local level.
Here’s just one example:
It has been nearly two years since Fayette County officials shuttered the Bernard Community Center, in rural West Tennessee. The closure has devastated the mostly Black residents who frequented the space to host after-school tutoring sessions for students, breakfasts for senior citizens, movie nights, knitting classes, and private events like birthdays and memorial services. “People used it for 20 years to help each other, to help themselves, and now that is just gone. It has had an emotional toll on people,” says Christine Woods, who served on the community center’s board and fought its closure.
Since the center was shut down, Woods and other advocates have organized protests and pled at public meetings for Fayette County’s board of commissioners to reopen it. But Woods says nobody seems to be listening on the board, whose 19 members are all white despite the county’s large Black population.
“If we had different representation on the county commission board, we would have had someone to stand up and fight for us,” Woods told Bolts and MLK50. “They don’t have to be someone Black, just someone who cares about our community. Someone who can see things from our eyes and feel our pain. Someone who knows what this center means to us, who thinks we deserve to have it. Right now, I think no commissioner feels that way.”
The make-up of the Fayette County board is by design. The county in 2021 drew a map with no majority-Black district, even after the board’s own counsel advised that the plan illegally diluted the power of Black voters, who make up roughly a quarter of the population.
Black residents won a reprieve this year, after Woods and other residents joined with the local NAACP to sue Fayette County, claiming the map violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Under the threat of their lawsuit, which followed another complaint filed by the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden, county officials relented in July and adopted a revised map for the 2026 elections that includes three majority Black districts.
The new map could significantly boost Black representation in Fayette County next year, but those gains already feel fragile. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to deliver a ruling in the coming months that could gut the VRA, threatening this county’s new districts and undermining similar challenges elsewhere.
That is, of course, the point. The Republicans (not just MAGA by any means) simply cannot live with the fact that they have to share any power with racial minorities (and Democrats more broadly).
Read the whole thing. It will break your heart. But then, what doesn’t these days?
Bessent: "No, no…Inflation hasn't gone up. And the one thing that we're not gonna do is do what the Biden administration did and tell the American people they don't know how they feel. They are traumatized." pic.twitter.com/TwDoPXqFmu
“I want for people to recognize a great job that I’ve done on pricing, on affordability, because we brought prices way down,” he said at an event billed as the McDonald’s Impact Summit on Monday.
Trump defames Zelenskyy: "He's always looking to purchase missiles. Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war. You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.pic.twitter.com/jI2eEO4Jvk
The “plan” appears to have come about at a secret meeting with Kushner and a Russian oligarch in Miami where they received Trump’s Russian orders:
U.S. officials and lawmakers are increasingly concerned about a meeting last month in which representatives of the Trump administration met with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian envoy who is under U.S. sanctions, to draft a plan to end the war in Ukraine, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
The meeting took place in Miami at the end of October and included special envoy Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Dmitriev, who leads the Russian Direct Investment Fund, one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds.
A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitriev has taken a leading role in talks with the U.S. about the war and has met with Witkoff several times this year. The Trump administration issued a special waiver to allow his entry, a senior U.S. official told Reuters.
Dmitriev and his fund were blacklisted by the U.S. government in 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The sanctions effectively bar American citizens and companies from dealing with them.
The meeting resulted in a 28-point plan for ending the war, two people familiar with the situation said. The plan, which was made public this week by Axios, came as a surprise to U.S. officials in various corners of the administration and has stirred confusion at embassies throughout Washington and in European capitals.
Get this part:
His visit also included a sit-down with U.S. Representative Anna Luna, a Florida Republican. In the meeting, Dmitriev and Luna spoke about increasing trade ties between the U.S. and Russia. Luna’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The meeting between the two was set earlier in the month amid statements by Luna that she had received Russia’s files on assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
In a video by RIA, one of Russia’s state news agencies, Luna is seen accepting a box of chocolates with Putin’s face inscribed on the front.
The images appear to show Luna and Dmitriev in a conference room at the Faena Hotel in Miami.
The Bizarro World in which MAGA lives descended another level last week with the response to the video by six Democratic members of Congress reminding servicemembers that they are duty bound not to carry out illegal orders. While never mentioning Donald Trump, they caution that “this administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.”
The rage from the right was as telling. As was their lack of listening comprehension. Repeatedly, one might say deliberately, many GOP congress members and online trolls claimed that the Democrats had urged servicemembers to disobey legal orders and Donald Trump himself. That is, just the opposite of what the video said.
I’m struck this week with the image from Charlotte of CBP agents violently arresting a worker reportedly doing restaurant construction. He is in a chokehold here and his face is bloodied in another photo.
ICE in Charlotte. The guy in the headlock is a restaurant worker. Barbarians. pic.twitter.com/CbR4N1YuJQ
It’s what the MAGA right sees in the photo that impresses. Good luck seeing what they are seeing. I see a cell phone in his right hand and nothing in his left. The Latino man is, by their photo analysis, holding a knife.
If he were really holding a knife, CBP would have shot first and asked questions later.
The responses to the Charlotte arrest photo on X include a string of photos of a Latino man accused of statutory rape in Wake County (Raleigh). They just see what they want to see.
Already real-looking AI videos of anthropomorphic wild animals litter my social media feeds. None of them can be trusted. My reaction to them aligns with my policy toward conspiracy theories: I believe none of them and I accept the risk of missing one somewhere in the pile that is real and being out of the know. Knock yourself out doing your own research. Life’s too short.
The number of daily fundraising texts to which I now reply “Stop” or “End” then “delete conversation” now nearly rivals the number of texts from friends and family. They come from candidates and causes and lists I’ve never heard of and for which I never never signed up.
The emails that pop in every day that spam filters miss has increased. The routine is rote now. Spot the no-name domain either gibberish or having no connection to the subject line, then hit “Block all senders using @blahblahblah” followed by “Trash all previous email from this sender.”
The annoying digital flood on our devices is out of control. But at least one retains some control. It’s the digital intrusion that leads to a police stop that one cannot simply ignore with a keystroke.
The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.
The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.
Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.
While masked Border Patrol thugs stop people for shopping at Home Depot or driving while brown, the same kind of algorithms that target your devices with unwanted spam now may result in a pretextural roadside police inquiry.
Border Patrol has a surveillance program tracking millions of drivers by name and then gets them pulled over for lies. Listen to the officer admit that he is careful to conceal the reason for the stop so if it ever gets questioned, no one will know that there was NO PROBABLE CAUSE.
The Border Patrol has for years hidden details of its license plate reader program, trying to keep any mention of the program out of court documents and police reports, former officials say, even going so far as to propose dropping charges rather than risk revealing any details about the placement and use of their covert license plate readers. Readers are often disguised along highways in traffic safety equipment like drums and barrels.
Intelligence services bug rival nations’ embassies. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol bugs I-35 and its siblings. Its algorithms monitor your daily comings and goings. For your safety, of course.
Laureen Hobbs: The Ecumenical Liberation Army is an ultra left sect, creating political confusion with wildcat violence and pseudo-insurrectionary acts – which the Communist Party does not endorse. The American masses are not yet ready for open revolt. We would not want to produce a television show celebrating historically deviational terrorism.
Diana Christensen: Miss Hobbs, I’m offering you an hour of prime time television every week, into which you can stick whatever propaganda that you want.
– from Network (1976), written by Paddy Chayefsky
I suppose one could describe The French 75, a likewise fictional radical group that figures prominently in Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling action-thriller/sociopolitical satire One Battle After Another as “an ultra left sect, creating political confusion with wildcat violence and pseudo-insurrectionary acts”.
In an audacious, pulse-pounding opening sequence, the group, led by charismatic firebrand Perfida Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, in a fearless performance) conducts a pre-dawn raid on San Diego’s Otey Mesa Detention Center, with the intention of freeing the immigrant detainees. Here we are also introduced to Perfida’s decidedly less disciplined compatriot and lover “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), the group’s explosives specialist.
As a parting shot, Perfida humiliates the facility’s steely-eyed, reactionary military commander, Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) ordering him to “get it up” while holding him at gunpoint. Final insult: she confiscates his service weapon and his hat. Palpably seething from the emasculation (despite being oddly aroused by the experience), he fixes her with a hateful stare and vows (like countless screen villains before him) that (in so many words) “we shall meet again”.
When they do meet again, Lockjaw (who is now heading up a special unit tasked with taking the French 75 down) literally gets her cornered as she is planting an explosive device in a bathroom stall. However, instead of arresting her, he tells her she can carry on with her group’s activities…as long she agrees to meet him for a motel room rendezvous. A dedicated revolutionary to the core, Perfida fights her rising gorge and appears to shrug it off as the cost of doing business.
Perfida’s steadfast commitment to the cause over all else is further evidenced after she gives birth to a daughter (at one point while she’s still with child, Pat confides to a group member that “it’s almost like she doesn’t even know she’s pregnant”). Pat (who also goes by the nickname “Rocketman”) is beginning to favor the pull of the nesting instinct over participating in the couple’s ever more risky political actions. He tries to gently persuade Perfida to do same, but to no avail.
And so Perfida abandons Pat and baby Charlene to continue the fight. Her streak ends when a bank robbery goes sideways and she fatally shoots a guard. To avoid spoilers, I’ll just say she exits the narrative at this point.
Flash-forward to present-day. Pat and his now (precocious) 16 year-old daughter (Chase Infiniti) have gone underground, living off-the-grid in a rural California burg with the assumed names “Bob” and “Willa”, respectively. Perhaps understandably, Bob lives in a constant state of anxiety and paranoia. He self-medicates by staying baked most of the time.
Inevitably, that day every ex-radical in hiding dreads comes to pass-The Man is at the door, and Bob has to get his ass out of Dodge, posthaste. The Man, in this case, is the family’s old nemesis, Steven J. Lockjaw (now a full bird colonel). Unfortunately, this happens while Willa is out with her friends. Bob reluctantly has to leave without her. With help from his “sensei” Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) Bob is eventually able to escape Lockjaw’s clutches and hits the road to find his daughter.
It’s tempting to call Anderson’s film “one chase after another”, as it doesn’t seem to pause very often for a breather in the course of its substantial 162-minute running time. Upon a second viewing (which I enjoyed even more than the first) I detected more nuance. After all, Anderson isn’t exactly revered as a premier “action director”.
While the chase scenes are expertly choreographed, breathtakingly filmed (in vintage VistaVision, no less) and genuinely exciting, it’s the little details that I love; e.g. DiCaprio toking up and reciting along with the dialog as he watches The Battle of Algiers (I also found myself laughing a lot more during the second viewing).
That’s not the only cinematic touchstone here; Anderson’s film evokes the anarchic political spirit of late 60s/early 70s films like Punishment Park, The StrawberryStatement, Zabriskie Point, and Getting Straight. The third act strongly recalls “long chase” classics like Vanishing Point and The Sugarland Express (especially with DP Michael Baumen’s expansive framing).
Anderson adapted his screenplay from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, but he has obviously updated a number of elements to reflect America in 2025 (even viewers who only casually follow politics will pick up on that right out of the gate). I referenced Sidney Lumet’s Network at the top of my review; Anderson’s film has a very similar streak of dark satire at its core. There’s also a whiff of Dr. Strangelove; “Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw” feels like a nod to “Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper”.
The cast is uniformly excellent, but DiCaprio and Penn are truly at the peak of their powers here. Penn, in particular has created one of the most unique heavies in recent memory; an amalgam of Colonel Kilgore and every jumped-up, overcompensating Greg Bovino with Little Man Syndrome currently prowling America’s cities whilst invested with the power of the state.
Even if you choose to eschew any political subtext, One Battle After Another can certainly be enjoyed as a piece of pure, exhilarating film making for grownups, and is the best film I’ve seen in 2025.
(Currently in theaters and available for PPV rental).
Leaders of some of the world’s most powerful countries pushed back on demands that Ukraine cede territory and limit the size of its army included in President Trump’s latest proposal to end the war with Russia. But they said they believed the plan provided a basis for further negotiations, according to a joint statement released after they met in Johannesburg on Saturday.
The proposal, a 28-point plan, calls for Ukrainian concessions already largely rejected by the country’s president and allies. Mr. Trump has given President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine until next week to agree to the plan, backing him into a seemingly lose-lose scenario as he faces the risk of losing crucial American support if he does not accept it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, will head to Geneva on Sunday, where they are expected to meet senior Ukrainian officials to discuss Kyiv’s response to the American proposal, a U.S. official said Saturday.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s allies in Europe and across the globe now face increased pressure to show they can get Ukraine the economic and military support it needs to continue battling Russia without U.S. support.
Mr. Trump’s plan “includes important elements that will be essential for a just and lasting peace,” said the statement, adopted by the leaders of 11 nations — including Germany, France, Britain, Japan and Canada — and the European Union.
President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Saturday that while he commended America’s efforts to strike a peace deal, “What is at stake is Ukrainian sovereignty and European security.”
He said European countries would work with the Ukrainians over the next two days to create a plan for the way forward.
The 28-point peace plan that the United States and Russia want to impose on Ukraine and Europe is misnamed. It is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else.
The plan was negotiated by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer with no historical, geographical, or cultural knowledge of Russia or Ukraine, and Kirill Dmitriev, who heads Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and spends most of his time making business deals. The revelation of their plan this week shocked European leaders, who are now paying almost all of the military costs of the war, as well as the Ukrainians, who were not sure whether to take this latest plan seriously until they were told to agree to it by Thanksgiving or lose all further U.S. support. Even if the plan falls apart, this arrogant and confusing ultimatum, coming only days after the State Department authorized the sale of anti-missile technology to Ukraine, will do permanent damage to America’s reputation as a reliable ally, not only in Europe but around the world.
The central points of the plan reflect long-standing Russian demands. The United States would recognize Russian rule over Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk—all of which are part of Ukraine. Russia would, in practice, be allowed to keep territory it has conquered in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. In all of these occupation zones, Russian forces have carried out arrests, torture, and mass repression of Ukrainian citizens, and because Russia would not be held accountable for war crimes, they could continue to do so with impunity. Ukraine would withdraw from the part of Donetsk that it still controls—a heavily reinforced and mined territory whose loss would open up central Ukraine to a future attack.
Not only would this plan cede territory, people, and assets to Russia; it also seems deliberately designed to weaken Ukraine, politically and militarily, so that Russia would find it easier to invade again a year from now, or 10 years from now. According to a version of the text that appeared in the Financial Times yesterday, the plan does state that “Ukraine’s sovereignty would be confirmed.” But it then imposes severe restrictions on Ukrainian sovereignty: Ukraine must “enshrine in its constitution” a promise to never join NATO. Ukraine must shrink the size of its armed forces to 600,000, down from 900,000. Ukraine may not host foreign troops on its soil. Ukraine must hold new elections within 100 days, a demand not made of Russia, a dictatorship that has not held free elections for more than two decades.
In return, the plan states that Ukraine “would receive security guarantees.” But it does not describe what those guarantees would be, and there is no reason to believe that President Donald Trump would ever abide by them. Russia would also “enshrine in law its policy of non-aggression towards Europe and Ukraine,” a bizarre and meaningless statement, given that Russia currently has a policy of permanent aggression not only toward Ukraine but also toward Europe and has, anyway, repeatedly violated promises before. The United States would lift sanctions on Russia, losing any existing leverage over President Vladimir Putin; invite Russia to rejoin the G8; and reintegrate Russia into the world economy. Awkward wording, evident throughout the document, suggests that at least some of it was originally written in Russian.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Here’s a tired Trump barely defending the plan:
Q: Is this your final offer to Ukraine?
TRUMP: No. One way or the other we have to get it ended. He can continue to fight his little heart out. pic.twitter.com/SDh8cKrUVs
U.S. lawmakers attempted Saturday to reverse days of confusion around a leaked peace plan for Ukraine, saying Secretary of State Marco Rubio assured them the document does not represent the Trump administration’s position.
Rubio called the bipartisan delegation to the Halifax International Security Forum on Saturday afternoon, they said, while en route to Geneva for talks with Ukrainian officials. He described the plan as a Russian proposal, they said, and not a U.S. initiative.
“He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). “It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received, and as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it — and we did not release it. It was leaked.”’
Their comments, at a Halifax press conference, amounted to a massive U-turn for an episode that has dominated the news this week and fueled a mad diplomatic scramble. The release of the plan has prompted questions in Kyiv, European capitals and Washington about whether the U.S. was backing a Kremlin-friendly plan.
Rubio told lawmakers that he was unaware of any plans by President Donald Trump to cut off intelligence sharing or military assistance if Ukraine rejected the terms.
It seems like only yesterday that the right was having a full blown hysterical meltdown over people allegedly “celebrating” Charlie Kirk’s death, often by simply posting his own words on social media. Hundreds them lost their jobs and had their lives upended.
We got endless lectures about “the left” causing violence with its rhetoric and radicalizing of allegedly millions of antifa warriors planning a war against the peaceful right.
Yeah.
The following is grotesquely profane so be careful with the sound up:
Trump called for my arrest, prosecution, and execution.
Almost immediately, the threats exploded—against me and my office.
All Americans must condemn this political violence.
It’s possible that one of Trump’s lackeys wrote that to perk him up but he may very well be self-soothing after a rough couple of weeks.
I mean, he almost certainly saw this one and so did his cult:
A Fox News poll conducted November 14–17 among 1,005 registered voters found that 76 percent now rate the U.S. economy negatively under Trump
That’s worse than the 70 percent negative view at the end of former President Joe Biden’s term.
By a nearly two-to-one margin, voters blame Trump more than Biden for the current economic climate (62 percent vs 32 percent).
Economic pessimism remained highest among voters under 45, non-college graduates, lower-income, Hispanic, and Black voters.
Aaaand:
According to an AP-NORC poll of 1,143 adults, 33 percent of Americans now approve of Trump’s management of the federal government, down from 43 percent eight months earlier.
Some 33 percent said they approved of the way Trump was handling the economy, with 67 percent disapproving.
I’m sure a few hours on the golf course and a nice Mar-a-lago party full of lovely ladies telling him what a great man he is will perk him right up.
