I’m definitely on the same page with Dem congresswoman Becca Balint of Vermont over our war with Venezuela (here), interviewed by Jonathan Capehart (not sure who the other individual is)...great point to lead off with mentioning Taiwan, since YOU KNOW Beijing will likely now say, “Hey, there’s now a precedent for regime change without prior approval from anybody” or words to that effect, and Lord knows what will happen next...and oh yeah, there’s also the potential for a bloodbath in Iran (oh, peachy)...great question about the fact that we went after Maduro, but #47 pardoned the guy in Honduras who was convicted of narco-terrorism for real...I’m old enough to recall Nixon’s “madman” thesis and how that was used to try and scare other countries; the problem is that we have someone in the White House now who is genuinely nuts...looks like the effort to distract from the Epstein files and skyrocketing ACA premiums is in full force...
...and David Pakman tells us that it looks like we have Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in custody, and yes, I know the legal stuff needs to proceed as necessary, but our ruling regime has a pretty poor track record when it comes to prosecuting those they consider to be criminals...and I think it’s telling that Pam “Blondi” decides to thank Our Treasonous Orange Pustule (For doing what exactly? And yes, I know it’s to inflate his ego once more) before our military, who actually put themselves in harm’s way in this escapade...and I’ll be honest; I don’t know anything about the intricacies of Venezuelan politics to know if it strategically makes sense for us to have Maduro out – maybe it does?? – but YOU DON’T DECIDE TO VIOLATE THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ANOTHER COUNTRY THAT HASN’T ATTACKED US WITHOUT GOING TO CONGRESS FIRST AT A MINIMUM FOR AUTHORIZATION!!!...and I forgot about that FIFA “peace prize” nonsense, which continues to leave a bad taste in the mouths of sane people everywhere...
..and Jesse Dollemore lets us know that it looks like Bari Weiss has made her first hire as the alleged head of CBS News, and that would be Tony Dokoupil as the new anchor for the chair that used to be helmed by Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, etc...the fact that this Dokoupil guy just casually refers to “Russia-gate” and Hunter Biden’s laptop as if they’re actual stories gives away the game as far as yours truly is concerned...for this Dokoupil guy to act like news coverage at what was once was called the “tiffany network” now miraculously WON’T be beholden to politicians and advertisers is beyond a joke (I was born at night, but not LAST night)...I’m glad Jesse recalls Dr. King and the March on Washington because he’s right; most of this country didn’t approve, but sometimes you have to “go against the grain” IMO, which I guess won’t be allowed now if some noisy special interest group doesn’t think that’s OK (and I’m glad Jesse works climate change into this, since I can’t think of a more important issue – more here)...
...and I’ll be honest; I’m not really big on cover tunes for the most part (except during the holidays of course), but I like this newer number, the first one of ’26.
To begin the new year, I give you the news that Apartheid Clyde was just awarded about a $1 trillion compensation package by the Tesla board, which is yet another reason not to buy their garbage vehicles (and get rid of them of you have one of them)...this tells us that he recently stood up in front of a group of his sycophants and said that the answer to crime is to basically have a RoboCop follow you around to keep you in line (and I guess this machine will say, “Come quietly or there will be...trouble”...as Sam and his crew from The Majority Report point out, that’s not going to do anything about white collar crime, which is likely the point)...
...and Jesse Dollemore tells us that “Don Snoreleone” is spending $100 million to recruit “dipsh*ts” (gun nuts, apparently) for ICE, based on WaPo reporting...and how much do you want to bet that the “geo targeting” will be primarily towards red states? And with our economy doing the “big swirl in the hopper,” I’m sure this campaign will draw in many low IQ bipeds looking to bust heads, unfortunately...I didn’t know that dozens of people have died in ICE custody, but considering what goes on I’m not surprised...when this madness is all mercifully over, we’re going to have to have a permanent reconciliation committee (or something like that) in the U.S. House with subpoena power that will recommend charges to the Justice Department (slightly NSFW/H)...
...and Farron Cousins tells us about #47 filing a lawsuit against Fed chair Jerome Powell, who the Gropenfuhrer says is “grossly incompetent” (as usual, every accusation is a confession)...oh, and spoiler alert; three guesses who appointed Powell and got him confirmed to head the Fed, and the first two don’t count...sooo, it looks like Pumpkin Pol Pot is suing Powell because of allegedly inflated costs for new Federal Reserve buildings (huh???)...the fact that Cheetoh Hitler keeps yapping about Powell and the Fed despite what that does to the full faith and credit of our financial institutions just emphasizes to yours truly that we indeed have a Manchurian Candidate in An Oval Office doing the bidding of Vlad The Butcher...I honestly was hoodwinked on the 4.3% GDP number in the past, to be honest – I should have realized that that was BS...
...and Brian Tyler Cohen discusses Cantaloupe Capone vetoing a bill for a pipeline project to bring clean drinking water to 39 communities in Colorado...shocked to give Lauren Boebert credit for actually doing her job for once, and yes, the bill truly received bipartisan support (though Boebert undoes her good work with that typically gonzo social media clip)...I think Cohen is spot-on to say that this is revenge against Boebert for signing onto the Epstein discharge petition, and also, Our Treasonous Orange Pustule is big mad at that state for quite rightly imprisoning Tina Peters for her attempts to rig the vote of the 2020 election...and of course, that Truth Septic message was “so presidential,” wasn’t it, especially the “may they rot in hell” part...and yes, we have another cautionary reminder of what loyalty truly means to Don The Con...NSFW/H...
...and David Shuster points out once more that Everything Trump Touches Dies, and that now also includes the Kennedy Center (and that’s what I’ll continue to call it), with a 35 percent drop in ratings for televised programming, to say nothing of artists bailing out on performing...oh, and Ric Grenell is going to sue musician Chuck Redd apparently? Yeah, that definitely won’t be thrown out of court I’m sure (here)...”Wherever the Trump name lands, seriousness flees and dignity evaporates” indeed... I know I just said that I try to emphasize clips from content creators having to do with policy and legislation affecting people’s lives and not focus so much on Trumpian BS, and maybe I’m doing that more than I should at the moment, but I believe attention must be paid, for better or worse...
...and apparently, MTV is no longer going to show music videos (here)...I checked out long ago on that network, but I still think that’s noteworthy...this was their first clip and apparently also their last, so please allow me to include it here to start the new year.
Farron Cousins lets us know here that Dementia J. Trump recently screeched that criticizing him is a national security threat...I don’t have a clue as to what triggered that last, lonely, flickering synapse in Cantaloupe Capone’s pudding brain that would make him attack the New York Times, but as Cousins says, it doesn’t take much for those red hat life forms to resort to violence in response, in particular against the media (and I’d forgotten about Obama standing up to Billo The Clown, who was every bit as rude and obnoxious in that interview as you would expect; this interminable year has made me forget what it’s like to have a functioning adult in the White House)...
...and Erielle Reshef of MS NOW speaks with Cameron Hume, former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, about the fact that Our Demented Orange Meat Sack recently ordered 30 U.S. diplomats home for some reason... Hume notes that the huge number of diplomats affected is unusual, as well as the fact that there was no turnover on 1/20, when there should have been turnover (I mean, yeah, the ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the prez, if you will, but given that we’re talking about #47, how much do you want to bet that these people were canned just because Our Tangerine Toddler heard they were part of the Biden admin and that was it?)...
...and in case anybody thought that this madness was somehow not noticed...well, you don’t have to worry about that, because it definitely IS getting noticed...Mike Figueredo of The Humanist Report informs us that PO’ed Americans are demanding revenge on #47 for his crimes...yeah, I think a lot of these memes are performative, but I agree with Figueredo that they indicate that something (whatever it is) is indeed going on...I honestly didn’t know that the anger had spread to grandmoms giving it back to performative wingnut(ette) Kaitlin Bennett, but there you are...and I WISH TO GOD that Democrats, as a party, truly understood the rage out there and the need to address it, but I’m not hopeful of that...”you can’t have a country where elites can violate the law with impunity” indeed (NSFW/H)...
...and we recently lost a true progressive champion, and that would be Howie Klein, who made his mark in the music biz and then turned to politics, creating a legacy of tireless work on behalf of candidates who truly sought to do the people’s business...way back in the “golden days of blogging,” I would leave comments at Klein’s great site Down With Tyranny and he responded in kind here, which definitely was appreciated...this post at Crooks and Liars in response to the Trump/Biden debate last year was typically spot-on (“Thinking Alfred is too old to care for the batcave is no reason to hire the Joker to replace him” indeed)...RIP...
...and just as I did on Monday, I’d like to pay tribute to three more figures in music who left us during the prior year; first is John Lodge of The Moody Blues...
...and last is Mick Ralphs of Mott The Hoople and Bad Company...
...and as is my custom, I want to take a minute or two and thank everyone who has spent any time at this site over the prior year. I said this time a year ago that this year was going to be bad with our clueless ruling regime of grifters, lowlifes and bottom-feeders (probably didn’t take much brain power to come up with that given the evidence), but one thing I didn’t note (because I couldn’t have known) is the extent of the push-back to the ruinous excesses of Don The Con and his playmates. We definitely can take solace from our courts telling Cheetoh Hitler that they’re not going to go along with our descent into something approximating a corporate dictatorship, and that also goes for the “No Kings” rallies, everyday people fighting back against the ICE goons, voices of protest emerging forcefully and effectively against Trumpism in general, et cetera.
I’d like to step back and go “meta” a bit here. I’m in the middle of my 21st year of doing this mess, believe it or not, and as I’ve said before, this is definitely a day-to-day, seat-of-the-pants operation. In case it isn’t apparent already, I’d like to give you a bit of insight into how the “sausage gets made,” you might say. When I started this, seemingly forever ago, I would often get pretty verbose and include as many links as possible within posts (I don’t know if the abbreviation TL,DR sprung up as a result of my stuff or not, but I’m sure I contributed to it). For reasons that are too involved and boring to explain, this morphed from acting as a PR forum for Democrats in general, to something confronting wingnut BS primarily, to something else where I tried to include discussions of how politics in general and particular legislation affected people’s lives, reinforced by videos from creators I respect, along with news reports that I thought should be promoted somehow. And oh yeah, that also includes paying attention to right-wing idiocy to a certain degree. I definitely try to balance all of this in a way that I think is interesting and worthy of people’s time. I mean, if you’re looking for the very latest on the apparent infighting between Ben Shapiro/Tim Pool/The Swanson TV Dinner Heir, you probably need to go somewhere else (I mean, I MIGHT touch on that, but probably not). Likewise, I try to balance the madness from Our Treasonous Orange Pustule and his minions and not obsess over every single revolting development. Basically, if I have a choice between including a video of #47 going nuts on Truth Septic with 150 posts versus another fine clip from More Perfect Union about how the insane tariffs from our *preznit are destroying a rural farming community, I’m definitely going to include the latter (as far as I’m concerned, if the majority of our corporate media did reports with the quality of the More Perfect Union segments, there might not be a need for this blog to even exist at all).
Additionally, I’d like to say something about a particularly important story and why you likely aren’t going to find much about that here, and that has to do with the utterly awful case of Jeffrey Epstein. Like many of you I’m sure, I’m thoroughly appalled by the destruction this has wrought on the lives of so many women (including, tragically, Virginia Giuffre, who took her own life...her case is still under investigation, it should be noted). The reason I haven’t said much about this is because a lot of the coverage (as far as I’m concerned) is this ridiculous corporate media “fan dance” concerning whether or not Mango Mussolini will ever release unredacted files indicating that he’s truly guilty as sin (which will NEVER happen, people), and I absolutely DO NOT want to feed into that. Yes, I know that the Tangerine Toddler said that he would release the files when he was running last year...but he said A LOT OF THINGS when he was running last year that haven’t come to pass, and likely never will. If anyone out there truly thought that you-know-who would come clean on this in particular, then I think you’re as dumb as a bag of rocks. There are a lot of stories out there where #47 is deliberately “flooding the zone” with BS in the media to force out coverage he doesn’t like, and this is just another example. Another is our runup to a military conflict somewhere, likely in Venezuela, which is a whole other horror show. As far as I’m concerned, he’ll ramp this up more and more as the economic news gets worse (the AI bubble shows signs of bursting, high net worth people stop spending, another pandemic looms, etc.), and please believe me when I tell you that I want to be wrong.
Our salvation in all of this lies in depending on each other, folks. As I alluded to earlier, we have the courts, particularly heroic individuals in the media, and our ongoing protests and acts of resistance. And oh yeah, the midterm elections are coming, so we can get back at the “party of Lincoln” with our ballots also (and I honestly don’t know if the Dems, as a national party, understand the scope of what’s at stake, but they damn well better – if we need to get after them also, we should do so with all speed).
So in consideration of all of this, I’d like to present once more my Patti Smith clip that I almost always include at year end; let it serve as an inspiration for continued resistance in our ongoing struggle (and best wishes to one and all for a much better 2026).
John of The Damage Report tells us that the Repugs are in trouble as voters shift over the utterly failed policies of Don The Con (once more, Harry Enten of CNN leads off with some data painting a justifiably gloomy picture...a 27-point spread in the wrong direction, huh? Wonder if Dementia J. Trump is going to go on TV again and yell over that?)...John does a pretty good job IMO of listing all of the stuff from the ”party of Lincoln” that isn’t going to amount to squat when it comes to turning around our economy...and boy, do I share John’s exasperation at the end...
...and Chris Hayes speaks with Jason Johnson, a prof at Morgan State university, and Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Ramirez about the fact that DOGE was an utter failure (in terms of realizing any kind of savings, though it likely was a success as far as Project 2025 is concerned)...great point by Johnson that we really don’t know how King Elmo rigged the SSA and what data he harvested for God know whatever purpose...glad Hayes reminds us of the US AID shutdown, and just because there’s not much reporting on it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t catastrophic in destitute areas of the world that need that assistance...and boy, is Johnson in particular ever right about the Dems needing to have a plan to run on in the year that is coming up; if you just say “orange man bad” and then think things will be status quo, those people who you thought were going to be in your “blue wave” are just going to stay home on election day...
...and Tennessee Brando believes that MAGA truly thinks you’re this stupid (and I agree, about MAGA being stoo-pid that is), with “Human Capital Sock” Kevin Hassett, who definitely cherry picks data where he feels it’s con-vee-nient...he’s actually correct about 4.3% GDP growth as near as I can tell, but that “Biden increased mortgages by 14K” or whatever that mess was is definitely debatable, perhaps due to rising interest rates and home prices (which on balance is good)...Biden also signed a first-time home buyers credit of about $15K as noted here, which of course Hassett doesn’t want to mention (more context on how Cantaloupe Capons has screwed the metaphorical economic pooch is here and here)...the “golden age of the grift” indeed...mildly NSFW/H...
...and RIP Brigitte Bardot...not sure I should even try to do justice to her pictures with my feeble words (and kudos to her for supporting animal rights...she took the worldwide fame she garnered with her beauty and did something constructive with it...towards the end of her life, though, her politics took a lamentable rightward turn, though you can compare that a bit to people in this country also, including Frank Sinatra and Charlton Heston, along with The Sainted Ronnie R of course)...
...and since we’re in year-end mode a bit, I think it’s called for to remember some folks we lost over the year, and way up on that list for yours truly is Bill Moyers (who also departed at 91 along with Bardot)...this “Democracy Now” clip presents Moyers talking about a connection between corporate media and corporate power, and not in a good way, and infiltrating government also (“consensual seduction” is probably about right)...I’d actually forgotten about LBJ’s connection to public TV, and I’m glad Moyers reminds us of that here (re: the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967)...Moyers is right about funding PBS and NPR independently of the federal government (perhaps through a trust fund as he mentions), but good luck with that particularly in this day and age...
...and in the time we have left this year, I’d also like to recall some notable departures in music, starting with Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys...
