Caturday

Chip at the vet's:

The Conservatives Are Having Conniption Fits About the Pope

He seems to be living the message of Jesus about immigrants and outcasts, and the Right, including the CouchFucker, is all "how dare he".

I suppose that the Leading Fake Christian in Congress is of the same opinion, but I haven't bothered to track it down. Frankly, he's such a despicable and detestable person that I feel an urge to wipe down my keyboard with a bleach wipe after typing his name. He should be greeted in public by people ringing bells and chanting "Shame! Shame!"

And you can totally buy one to ring whenever a politician from the Group of Pedos is about.

Let's Be Clear About One Thing: There Is No "Department of Justice" Anymore

It's Trump's Taxpayer-Paid Legal Department.

The Justice Department on Thursday sued to block new congressional district boundaries approved by California voters last week, joining a court battle that could help determine which party wins control of the U.S. House in 2026.

They've done nothing about Texas's gerrymandering, hell, Trump called for it. But gerrymandering for Democrats is illegal, according to Trump's personal lawyer, the eminently bribable Pam Bondi.

Gerrymandering for the GOP without voter approval: Bondi likes.

Gerrymandering for the Democrats with voter approval: Bondi sues.

Trump, Epstein and More

First off, it's coming out that Epstein and Trump were friends for a lot longer than Trump has said. Epstein was coaching Steve Bannon on a media campaign to support Trump in 2018.

Trump has no real friends, he never has. Every relationship in his life is transactional. He keeps people in his orbit for what they can do for him. When they can't do anything more for him, they're gone. That Epstein was in his life for so long speaks volumes.

Second, I want to pivot to Jimmy Kimmel, who lost his lifelong friend and bandleader, Cleto Escobedo III. Kimmel's taking a few days off, but he did his show the day Escobedo died. His monologue was a heartfelt eulogy to his friend.

On social media, I've read some pretty brutal comments, mocking Kimmel for showing his feelings and calling him all sorts of nasty shit. I'm not going to quote or link to them. But if that's you, check your head. You're showing what kind of character that you have and it's not flattering to you.

Because It's Friday

The Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway:

Those steam engines are all original to the railroad for working service.

The Coming Epstein War

The most advanced U.S. aircraft carrier is expected to reach the waters off Venezuela in days, a flex of American military power not seen in Latin America for generations.

Experts disagree on the possibility that American warplanes will catapult off the USS Gerald R. Ford to bomb targets inside Venezuela and further pressure authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro to step down.

The classic move of an embattled autocrat is to start a war with somebody in order to wave the flag and rally the populace. The Argentinian junta played that card by invading the Falkland Islands in 1982. (The junta fell after losing that war.)

Any military action by the Trump regime will be to distract the American people from the fact that Trump is a pedophile who features prominently in the Epstein files.

Cowering These Down, Here

Trump is Clearly a Pedophile and He is Terrified That His Base Will Find Out (Updated)

So he is doing everything humanly possible to stop the vote on the Epstein discharge petition.

Q: "Why are White House officials…meeting with Rep. Boebert in an effort to try to get her to not sign this petition calling for the release of the [Epstein] files?" Leavitt: "I'm not going to detail conversations that took place in the situation room."

[image or embed]

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) November 12, 2025 at 1:55 PM

The Orange Pervert dragging Handsy down to the Situation Room to pressure not to sign the petition seems a bit much.

EDITED to ADD:

One reason you hold a meeting to pressure/cajole/threaten Boebert in the Situation Room is so she can't record it.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) November 12, 2025 at 4:50 PM

And this guy agrees.

As the saying go, the rubber is going to hit the road when the Epstein file bill comes up for a vote next week. Will we see a shitload of GOP reps voting for it, now that they'll have to go on the record about whether or not to keep on protecting Trump's alleged pedophilia? Because you know, Gentle Reader, that if he wasn't in it up to his hairline, that he'd not be fighting so hard to keep it under wraps.

Megyn Kelly Is a Disgusting Excuse For a Human Being

She's trying to redraw the line of what is pedophilia in order to protect Trump and Epstein.

So, in her view, fucking a child is OK if a Republican is the one who is doing the fucking.

ICE, As Unprofessional As Always

A police officer intervened when he saw a man - who later identified himself as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent - point a gun at a driver in Santa Ana, California Sunday afternoon, officials said.
...
Police said the officer saw a man exit his car while pointing a gun at the female driver behind him.
...
According to police, the armed man identified himself as an ICE agent, provided credentials and told the Fullerton officer that the woman had been following and recording him.

"The Fullerton Police Officer informed the agent that he could not assist with someone following or recording him if no crime had occurred, and that local law enforcement (Santa Ana PD) was en route. The female left the area shortly after," police said.

That's not the only ICE goon to point a gun at people taking photos:

One of these days, one of these unprofessional, untrained armed nitwits will pull a gun on a cop and get ventilated for his trouble.

Trump and his lackies in Congress tripled ICE's budget. It needs to be shaved by 90%.

ICE, CBP and the rest of the goons at DHS have been trampling over the law. The law moves slowly, but it will come for them.

Staining These Down, Here

CBS: Who Needs Standards?

That's the viewpoint of CBS News's new boss.

There are growing concerns within CBS News that Bari Weiss could gut or even disband the network’s Standards and Practices team, with multiple sources telling The Independent that the new editor-in-chief has complained that the unit has “too much power” and she doesn’t see the point of keeping it around.
...
“The team is responsible for ensuring editorial standards are met on scripts and provides daily reporting guidance. They literally uphold journalistic standards,” one CBS News reporter said, adding that it would be “crazy” for the network to dissolve Standards and Practices.
...
“I’ve been hearing that standards will be eliminated or severely cut back. Bari has told people that she wants to get rid of standards and is shocked that they have so much power. She also asked openly, ‘What’s the point of standards?’” one CBS News insider claimed.

Weiss is on a quest to transform CBS from "the Tiffany network" to "the cracked plastic cup that a hobo fished out of a dumpster network". She wants to change CBS to Fox News 2.0, a news network that serves, not the American people, but the oligarchs and Donald Trump. But since CBS is now owned by an oligarch, that's to be expected.

There are plenty of other news sources, which you should think of pursuing.

Veterans' Day

For all veterans.

I remember an old man who lived one block down when I was a kid. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. World War I veterans and their wives were senior administrators and teachers and factory managers. WWII veterans and women war workers were raising families (a WASP lived two doors down). Older kids were sweating being drafted for Vietnam.

This blog was active while there were still a few Great War veterans alive. The veterans from World War II are almost gone. The Vietnam War vets are in their seventies and older. The Korean War vets are in their nineties.

This is a day to honor all veterals, living and passed. Sadly, we keep making and needing more of them. And then disregarding their needs after their service is over.

The Nazi Right

A few links of what has been going on. Here and here.

This is a repeatting cycle with the Right. The neo-Nazi John Birch society tried to take over the conservative movement in the 1960s. But just as Trump did in 2017, the leading conservatives talked about the good people in the Bircher movement. That the Birchers were a pack of racists, segregationists and antisemites didn't bother them at the time and doesn't bother them now.

There is a persistent and pernicious belief on the far Right that we fought on the wrong side in the Second World War. That those clowns have gotten their man into the Oval Office is a national shame.

For Trump and the Nazi Republicans, Starvation and Cruelty Are the Point

The Trump administration is telling states not to pay full November food stamp benefits, revising its previous guidance after winning a temporary victory at the Supreme Court on Friday.

USDA’s latest memo, sent Saturday to state directors of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, instructed states to deliver just 65 percent of benefits during the government shutdown and required those who already sent full payments to claw back that money.

“To the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized. Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025,” the memo notes.

Intentional cruelty is a happmark of modern "conservatism" and this administration.

Racist as Fuck: Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation had two memorial panels removed from a military cemetery in Holland. Because those panels described the work of, as the Dutch see it, Black Liberators.

The Dutch are not amused. Nor should they be. they were occupied by Nazi Germany and the Heritage Foundation, as recent events has shown, is Nazi-infused.

I haven't been blogging about the Nazi/groyper fighting going on there. Maybe I'll write up a quck sketch of it. For it seems that the Right can go from Conservative to Nazi in no time flat.

Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise

Burt Rutan's company Beech Starship:

I don't know how many others are out there. Beechcraft bought back every one they could find and scrapped them.

"Don the Pedophile Stadium" Does Have a Ring to It

President Donald Trump wants the Washington Commanders to name their planned $3.7 billion stadium after him, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told ESPN.

A senior White House source said there have been back-channel communications with a member of the Commanders' ownership group, led by Josh Harris, to express Trump's desire to have the domed stadium in the nation's capital bear his name. The new stadium is being built on the old RFK Stadium site that served as the team's home from 1961 to 1996.

Sure, go ahead. Name that shit after him.

And in 2029, we'll put a TV in his prison cell so he can watch his name be chiseled off of everything. He can watch the gilding be ripped off of the White House and his ballroom demolished into rubble. And then he can watch coverage of the trials and proceedings in which every Trump company is dismantled for corruption and his kids also get sent to prison for their financial crimes.

Trump's legacy will be erased. His memory will be as toxic as that of his mentor in Germany.

And you can bet the farm on that.

Your Shit May Even Be Later

UPS and FedEx said they are grounding their fleets of McDonnell Douglas MD-11 planes “out of an abundance of caution” following a deadly crash at the UPS global aviation hub in Kentucky.

The crash Tuesday at UPS Worldport in Louisville killed 14 people, including the three pilots on the MD-11 that was headed for Honolulu.

MD-11 aircraft make up about 9% of of the UPS airline fleet and 4% of the FedEx fleet, the companies said.

My guess is that those airplanes will go to the boneyard, especially if the AI bubble crashes things next year.

Caturday

The "I hate my food" glare, directed at teh server (me).

A Drop in the Bucket and Corporate Welfare (Updated with OpenAI Losses)

Wal-Mart is donating $500K to food banks. They have 4,600 stores, so they're donating less than $110 per store.

They are seriously cheap fucks. Brookshire Grocery, which has about 200 stores, is donating half a million.

If you donated a load of groceries to a food bank, the chances are that you, proportionately, did more to help people needing food than did Wal-Mart.

Keep in mind that SNAP, the ACA and Medicare work also as subsidies to labor exploiters like Wal-Mart, which thereby don't need to pay a living wage to their workers.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, which is backed by billionaires and large tech giants, wants the government to back their loans, so they will have nothing at risk. (OpenAI lost about $12 billion last quarter.)

Sam Altman read the room and realized that asking for a few hundred billion in loan guarantees wasn't a good sell when tens of millions of Americans are going hungry, so he walked that back.

For now. Corporations and oligarchs always seem to want the government to guarantee their shit, while deriding those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Socialism for the rich, same as it ever was.

Because It's Friday

A USATC locomotive in the UK:

Corruption and Fealty, Coastie Ed.

Coast Guard Exchanges at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in Centreville, Virginia, recently stocked Trump-branded wine and cider, according to a photo posted on Instagram and confirmed by Forbes from calls to the stores.

Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin confirmed the exchanges were carrying Trump wines in a statement to Forbes, saying, “The brave men and women of the USCG are pleased to be able to buy Trump wine and cider tax free.”

If Biden had sold coffee through the military exchanges, the Republicans would have twisted them into knots in their haste to get in front of a microphone. But there will be nothing but crickets from the Right on this.

It is corrupt? Possibly. But it sure smells rotten for a present to sell his goods through a semi-captive system.

Dyeing These Down, Here

Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino Is a Motherfucking Liar and a PerjurerandThey Can Indict a Ham Sandwich, But Not Convict It

Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who led a series of increasingly aggressive raids across Chicago and its suburbs, lied about firing tear gas at protesters in Little Village and tackling a man outside the Broadview ICE facility, a federal judge said Thursday.

He lied repeatedly (and so did his subordinates and the government's lawyers). That should be noted in any case he testifies in down the road.

Meanwhile, Drunken Jeanine lost another one:

Jurors showed no appetite for the Justice Department's case against "sandwich guy," the D.C. resident who chucked a Subway sandwich at the chest of a federal officer, finding him not guilty Thursday after several hours of deliberations.
...
Border Patrol Officer Greg Lairmore received two "gag gifts" related to the incident — a plush sandwich and a patch featuring a cartoon of Dunn throwing the sandwich with the words “Felony Footlong” — which the defense team argued showed this was not a serious event in his life.

Lairmore had testified that the sandwich “exploded all over” his chest and claimed he could smell mustard and onions. But a photo showed that the sandwich was still in its wrapper on the ground after it hit Lairmore in his bulletproof vest.

So, yet another cop got on the stand and testilied about the facts of the case.

The one difference between the American Gestapo and the original is that, for now at least, their bullshit sometimes gets dragged into the light in front of a jury.

Invest in Popcorn

A few conservative representatives with ties to the FBI and the Justice Department have spilled that the true details of the Epstein files are “worse” for Trump than previously reported, according to journalist David Schuster.

Michael Wolff, a longtime chronicler of Trump’s White House who conducted extensive interviews with Epstein prior to his death, told The Daily Beast last month that Epstein had shown him photos of Trump with half-naked “young girls” in his lap.

These rumors have galvanized into a legitimate movement among Republicans, who are now, Schuster wrote on X Wednesday night, clamoring for the files’ full release.

And so you see why the Republicans will move Heaven and Earth to keep the government closed in order to keep the government closed and keep the Epstein files hidden.

Republicans are protecting a major pedophile, and they are fully aware of that. Never ever forget that.

Supporting the Troops, Trump Style

An Army installation’s dining facility is closed because of the government shutdown, officials said.

The Fort Leavenworth Installation Warrior Restaurant is closed “until further notice,” base officials announced in a Facebook post. The Warrior Restaurant is the sole dining facility, or DFAC, on the Kansas base.

For most junior enlisted soldiers, DFACs are one of the few on-base options for meals, especially if they don’t have cars to get off post. Additionally, for those living in the barracks, a portion of their paycheck is allocated to cover the costs of eating at the dining facility.

Cadet Bone Spurs and Pee-Wee German had no trouble with moving funds to pay for his wall[1] when Congress wouldn't fund it, so one might conclude that the only reason they're going all-in on starving the troops is pure cruelty.
_______________________
[1]Such a beautiful wall. Big tough wall operators, straight out of Central Casting, with tears in their eyes, were saying Sir, we've never seen such a magnificent wall.

Hakeem Jeffries is Still Full of Shit

Quite wrong. Being anti-Trump, anti-GOP is not the same as being pro-Democratic party. I doubt very much if any meaningful number of people went to the polls thinking that their votes were ratifications of what Jeffries and Schumer are doing or not doing.

A lot of Democrats won because voters looked at the economic and political chaos brought by Trump and said "whoa." Eight million people don't turn out in the street nationwide because they're happy with the way things are going. Mayor-elect Mamdani received more votes than the total turnout in some of the recent NYC mayoral elections. Two Democrats won seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, the first Democrats to be seated there in this century.

Voters are not happy and the person they are most unhappy with is the president and his lackeys. Watch for an uptick of Republicans in the House deciding to retire. And I expect some long-term Democrats to read the room and also opt to quit.

But for today, I am enjoying the fact that Andrew Cuomo lost two elections this cycle.

Gee. Who Saw This Coming?

Criminals posing as US immigration officers have carried out robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults in several states, warns a law enforcement bulletin issued last month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The bureau urges agencies to ensure officers clearly identify themselves and to cooperate when civilians ask to verify an officer’s identity—including by allowing calls to a local police precinct. “Ensure law enforcement personnel adequality [sic] identify themselves during operations and cooperate with individuals who request further verification,” it says.

So, to sum up, criminals are impersonating another group of criminals.

Someone with a mask and a gun should be presumed to be a violent criminal. Any clown can buy an ICE raid jacket.

Plopping These Down, Here