The double-tap strikes are appalling and illegal, but Hegseth is merely following the bloody path Barack Obama blazed. Obama's drone assassination team even had a name for wounded survivors they would target for a second kill strike: squirters. According to David Shedd, Obama’s former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “We used double-taps all the time. You would get the initial signature off of a target that’s been hit and if you saw that they ‘squirted’ and were injured … you hit them again.” Shedd told Washington Post columnist Mark Thyssen: “There was often a second predator ready to go … that was fully expected to be used if you didn’t have a 100 percent coming out of the first hit — and maybe a third hit…It was done routinely.”

Screengrab from a video posted on Truth Social by Donald Trump, showing the first missile strike on a boat allegedly hauling illegal narcotics on Sept. 2, 2025.

Getting away with murder must be quite easy, provided that your motive is sufficiently inscrutable.

– Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound

Pete Hegseth is a producer of snuff films. The media-obsessed, if not media-savvy, Hegseth has produced 21 of these mass murder documentary shorts in the last three months, featuring the killings of 83 people–if you take his word for it. Hegseth introduces these kill shots like Alfred Hitchcock presenting an episode of his old TV show–without the irony, of course. There’s no irony to Pete Hegseth. No intentional irony, that is. It’s all bluster and protein-powder bravado to titillate the Prime-time Fox audience as they nibbled at their TV dinners.

Who were the people being killed? What did they have in their boats? Where were they going? No one seemed to care. Pete certainly didn’t care. It was the explosion that mattered, the now you see it, now you don’t quality of the videos.

Pete’s snuff films have the mise en scène of a ’90s video game, the zombie slaughter games Pete grew up on, burning callouses onto his thumbs from obsessive use of this joystick.

The irony, lost on Hegseth, is that these are the precise kinds of videos that ethical whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning used to scrape from the secret vaults of the Pentagon and ship to Wikileaks. Videos of crimes committed by US forces. In his dipsomaniacal mind, Hegseth seems to believe these snuff films are proof of the power and virility of the War Department under his leadership. In fact, each video is a confession. The question is: will he be held to account and who will have the guts to do it?

As the Washington Post reported, the very first of Hegseth’s snuff films had a gory epilogue that he chose not to share. Shortly after the smoke cleared from the missile strike, the drone video footage showed that two people had survived the attack and were clinging to the smoking wreckage of the boat. The commander of the operation, Navy Adm. Frank Bradley, ordered two more missile strikes: one to kill the survivors and another to destroy the remains of the boat and the bodies of its crew. According to the Post, Bradley was acting under the orders of Hegseth to “kill everybody.”

But the crime that left survivors shouldn’t be obscured by the crime that killed the survivors. Calling them “war crimes” doesn’t seem right, since there’s no declared war, congressional authorization or legal justification for the strikes. Serial mass murder is a far more accurate description.

The Trump brain trust had a hard time getting its story straight. First, they denied the Post’s story of a second strike. It didn’t happen. Fake news. Complete fabrication. Trump came out to say he wouldn’t have supported a second strike and didn’t believe it happened. On Monday, they sent Karoline Leavitt out to admit a second strike had taken place, but that Hegseth knew nothing about it. Next, they blamed the second strike on Adm. Bradley. This was followed by a statement saying the second strike was perfectly legit and that Bradley was fully authorized to order the killing of the two survivors. By Thursday, they were telling Congressional leaders that the second strike wasn’t aimed at killing the survivors but sinking the remains of the boat. The survivors were just collateral damage.

Sept 2

Hegseth: “I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.”

Oct. 23, after reports that people had survived another attack…

Hegseth: “So the Department of War is not going to degrade, or just simply arrest. We’re going to defeat and destroy these terrorist organizations to defend the homeland on behalf of the American people.”

Trump: “We’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country.”

Nov. 28

Hegseth responded to the Post story: “Fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory.”

Nov. 30

Trump: “He [Hegseth] said he did not say that, and I believe him. I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine, and if there were two people around, but Pete said that didn’t happen. I have great confidence.”

Hegseth mocking the murders he authorized…

  • I don’t know if this was ever a serious country, but once it pretended to be…

Dec. 1

Reporter: Does the administration deny that that second strike happened or did it happen and the administration denies that Hegseth gave the order?

Leavitt: The latter is true.

Reporter: Admiral Bradley was the one who gave that order for a second strike?

Leavitt: And he was well within his authority to do so.

Hegseth: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.”

Dec. 2

Karoline Leavitt: “Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”

In fact, the second strike, and any order to authorize one, is a clear violation of Section 5.4.7 of the DOD Law of War Manual:

Prohibition Against Declaring That No Quarter Be Given. It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given. This means that it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed. Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter. This rule is based on both humanitarian and military considerations. This rule also applies during non-international armed conflict.

Dec. 3

Hegseth: “I watched that first strike live. I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours or whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting. A couple of hours later, I learned that the commander had made the decision, which he had the complete authority to do. And by the way, 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.”

“Two hours or whatever?” It was actually just a couple of minutes: “A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.” Where did Hegseth go, down to his private make-up studio to fix his face for an appearance on Fox News?

Reporter: “So you didn’t see any survivors, to be clear, after that first strike, you personally?”

Hegseth: “I did not personally see survivors, but I stand—because the thing was on fire. That was exploded [sic], and fire or smoke—you can’t see anything. You got digital. This is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don’t understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about ‘kill everybody’ phrases on anonymous sources, not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.”

Fog of war? Air-conditioned offices? Neither Hegseth nor Bradley was on a battlefield or in a Navy assault vessel. They weren’t being shot at. They were in offices watching real-time video feeds and calling down drone strikes on unarmed speedboats or fishing vessels.

Hegseth, sitting in front of a nameplate calling him, “Ssecretary of War” (emphasis on the SS, I suppose), showing no remorse and still in full-berserker mode: “We’ve only just begun striking narco-boats and putting narcoterrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they’ve been poisoning the American people.”

+++

  • There’s a chapter in Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors, titled “More lethality, less lawyers,” where Hegseth calls JAG lawyers “Jagoffs” (take note, Lindsey Graham) and recounts telling the National Guard troops under his command in Iraq to ignore the rules of engagement.

Needless to say, no infantrymen like army lawyers – which is why JAG officers are often not so affectionately known as ‘jagoffs’….Most spend more time prosecuting our troops than they do putting away bad guys. It’s easier to get promoted that way.

After this briefing [by a JAG officer on the Rules of Engagement in Iraq], I pulled my platoon together, huddling amid their confusion to tell them, ‘I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed. And I will have your back – just like our commander. We are coming home, the enemy will not.’

  • The “kill them all” “double-tap” strike by SEAL Team 6 on alleged drug runners in the Caribbean has been a regular tactic in Israel’s military assault on Gaza for the last two years, often targeting not only the survivors of the initial attack but also those who come to rescue the wounded.

  • The Washington Post reported that even the CIA doubted the legality of the drugboat attacks:

Amid pushback on CIA action from lawyers in the late spring, the administration forged ahead with an alternative plan that was already under discussion: to use the U.S. military. And it came up with a legal justification that national security law experts inside and out of government have said does not stand up to facts: that the country was in a ‘non-international’ armed conflict with ‘designated terrorist organizations.

  • Sen. Jacky Rosen, the Nevada Democrat, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee: “Hegseth likely committed a war crime when he gave an illegal order that led to the killing of incapacitated survivors of the U.S. strike in the Caribbean. He should resign immediately.”

  • I repeat: the disgusting killing of the survivors, as they clung to the wreckage of a burning boat, should not be used to distract from the equally illegal killing of the other occupants of the boat.

  • This from Justin Amash, a Palestinian-American and former libertarian Member of Congress from Michigan…

The double-tap strikes are appalling and illegal, but Hegseth is merely following the bloody path Barack Obama blazed. Obama’s drone assassination team even had a name for wounded survivors they would target for a second kill strike: squirters. According to David Shedd, Obama’s former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “We used double-taps all the time. You would get the initial signature off of a target that’s been hit and if you saw that they ‘squirted’ and were injured … you hit them again.” Shedd told Washington Post columnist Mark Thyssen: “There was often a second predator ready to go … that was fully expected to be used if you didn’t have a 100 percent coming out of the first hit — and maybe a third hit…It was done routinely.”

+++

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene opposes regime change in Venezuela: “I don’t believe in regime change. I don’t believe we should be engaging in war, period. I believe in fully protecting our borders and our people, but I don’t think that we need to go out and attack other countries.”

  • As long as MTG was talking about “Jewish space lasers” causing climate change, Trump was all for her. But once she started opposing his wars and ties to Israel, she was expendable.

  • “Writes Elliott Abrams”…say no more!

  • Nicolas Maduro: “How could I be a dictator if I wasn’t trained at the School of the Americas, at Harvard? I was not trained at Langley, or West Point…I was trained in the high schools of Caracas, in the neighbourhoods of El Valle, 23 de Enero, Catia, Propatria, and El Cementerio.’

  • Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) on Venezuela: “We’re about to go in … We need to go in … Venezuela for the American oil companies will be a field day.” You didn’t really think the drive for regime change in Venezuela is about drugs, did you?

  • Saagar Enjeeti: “I can buy how people fell for WMDs in the wake of 9/11, but if you buy Venezuelan fentanyl, you’re actually just an imbecile.”

+++

  • The UN resolution against torture had three votes against: Israel, Argentina and the US….

  • IDF Press Release: “The Air Force eliminated two suspects this morning in the southern Gaza Strip who crossed the yellow line, carried out suspicious activities… and approached the forces.” The two “suspects” were 8 and 11…

  • Francesca Albanese, the UN rapporteur on the Occupied Territories, on some of the dire consequences of being sanctioned by the US: “My medical insurance refused to reimburse me. I have a private medical insurance and they refused to reimburse me because I’m sanctioned by the US.”

  • Infanticide as “Test”…

  • Nearly 9,300 children under five in Gaza were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition in October, warning that winter conditions are increasing the risk of illness and death among displaced families, UNICEF reported. The agency stated that large quantities of winter supplies remain stuck at Gaza’s borders and called for the safe and unobstructed delivery of humanitarian aid through all available routes.

  • 77% of Democratic voters say Israel is committing genocide and 75% want to cut off weapons to Israel. But HRC is out on the road claiming that TikTok and “totally made up” videos are the blame for young people’s opposition to genocide.

  • Here’s Hillary Clinton (at a summit in NYC hosted by the Israeli daily Israel Hayom on US/Israeli relations) once again blaming social media for perverting the minds of American youth about the genocide in Gaza:

Our own students, smart young people, from our own country, from around the world. Where were they getting their information? They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok. That is where they were learning about what happened on October 7th. What happened in the days, weeks and months to follow. That’s a serious problem. It’s a serious problem for democracy, whether it’s Israel or the United States. I was shocked about how little students knew about the history and the context…When you think about how to tell Israel’s story, it’s important. It’s not just looking internally. It’s looking externally and particularly at young people. Because it’s not just the USUAL SUSPECTS; it’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand.

  • Those smug, pursed lips say it all…She seethes arrogance out of every pore. It’s part of why she lost to Trump, of all people. Young people have a better understanding of what’s going on than she did as Secretary of State.

  • Why does Israel need Hillary’s help in “telling its story”? Haven’t they got the NYT, CNN and The Atlantic for that?

  • Shawan Jabarin, the longtime Palestinian Human Rights activist with Al-Haq, on the UN’s endorsement of the Trump “ceasefire” plan for Gaza, which gives Israel indefinite control over the Strip:

To seek, as a matter of supposed political compromise, to sideline international law would be to render the U.N. complicit in Israel’s violations, to fundamentally break the promise of the U.N. Charter and to fuel only ever intensifying human carnage.

  • Pete Hegseth is our Ben-Gvir…

  • Israel has finally consented to open the Rafah Crossing, a vital corridor for the transport of humanitarian aid into Gaza. But they’re only opening it for people leaving the Strip, most of whom Israel says it won’t allow to return. The October ceasefire agreement stipulated that the crossing must be open in both directions. So add another violation of the truce to the 500 previous ones Israel has committed in the last two months.

  • Amid senatorial uproar over the lopsided Ukraine deal, Sen. Mike Rounds, the Republican from South Dakota, told reporters that Marco Rubio had assured a bipartisan group of disgruntled senators that Trump’s Ukraine plan wasn’t really a Trump plan but was a Russian proposal:

He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.

But only a few hours later, Rubio fessed up on social media, admitting that the Trump administration had “authored” the plan. Was Rubio lying to his former colleagues or simply out of the loop? This week, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, but not the Secretary of State, went to Moscow to try to sell the plan to Putin.

  • You can’t really blame Trump for drifting off. Marco Rubio is the aural equivalent of swallowing five melatonin tablets…

Screengrab from C-Span coverage of Trump cabinet meeting.

  • Nearly every Trump appearance now eventually turns into a live reenactment of Warhol’s Sleep…the questions the predictive markets are laying odds on are: which way will he slump and whose voice will deliver the knockout punch?

  • Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump’s roving envoy Steve Witkoff has been trying to seduce Ukrainian leaders into accepting the lop-sided peace deal by pushing the ludicrous notion of soldiers “disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American-built AI data centers.”

+++

  • The RFK Center for Human Rights has issued a deeply disturbing report on medical neglect and abuse of pregnant women in ICE detention:

ICE detention has become a black box. Oversight has been gutted. Families are being separated. Pregnant and postpartum women report starving in custody, freezing cells, invasive procedures, miscarriages, and their pleas for help going unanswered. Some of the women report being fed nothing more than a tiny frozen burrito in an entire day. Others say they “dream of eating meat” after going weeks without protein. What we’re seeing is not isolated incidents, but a systemic failure that is putting lives at risk. ICE’s own directive generally prohibits the detention of pregnant people. Yet under the current administration, pregnant women are being detained, restrained, and subjected to medical neglect.

  • Last Friday, Christian Jimenez was driving his dad’s Ford F-150 truck with a friend while on lunch break from McMinnville High School in Oregon, when they noticed four unmarked cars following them. Unnerved, Jimenez pulled onto 99W, the Pacific Coast Highway, to try to lose his pursuers. But this maneuver apparently prompted the cars that had been tailing Jimenez to surround the F-150 and pull him over.

The cars were filled with ICE agents. As one of them smashed the driver’s side window and forced his way into Jimenez’s car, the teen yelled, “I’m a US citizen! I’m a US citizen!” The ICE agent snapped, “I don’t care.” Jimenez was pulled out of the truck, cuffed and taken to jail.

Christian Jimenez is 17 years old and a US citizen.

On the Monday following his arrest, 300 of his fellow students walked out of their high school classes in protest.

When Oregon Senator Jeff Berkeley inquired about Jimenez’s arrest, DHS officials claimed that the teen had used his father’s car to “violently attack” ICE agents, a common excuse for ICE arrests of US citizens that has often been disproved by cell-phone video and body cam footage.

No ICE agents were injured during the operation.

In the last week alone, ICE has detained at least four US citizens in Oregon, including two women for filming ICE operations.

  • Bruna Caroline Ferreira, the mother of White House press flackette Karoline Leavitt’s 11-year-old nephew, was arrested and is facing deportation. A native of Brazil, Ferreira has been living here for 27 years, is the mother of a US citizen and has no criminal record. She was brought to the US a the age of 6. And went to elementary, middle, and high school here. Did Karoline snitch her out? If she didn’t snitch her out, did she conceal the fact that she had a relative living in the US who, by her own administration’s brutal and unforgiving standards, was here illegally? In other words, was Leavitt helping to provide “sanctuary” for Bruna? If so, I’m all for it and would contribute to her bail if ICE comes after her for aiding and abetting a “criminal alien”…

  • Fátima Issela Velasquez-Antonio came to the Triangle area of North Carolina in 2016 when she was 14 to live with her extended family after her father was murdered by a gang in Honduras. Her mother had died a few years earlier of cancer. She graduated from Corinth Holders High School and had been working for an HVAC company when she was detained by Border Patrol during a raid on a construction site in the Charlotte area. In her nine years living in the US, Velasquez-Antonio’s “criminal” record consists entirely of two traffic citations. She is now being held at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, awaiting deportation to the country where gangs killed her father.

  • A court security guard at the Licht Judicial Complex in Providence, Rhode Island, noticed a masked man taking photographs inside the courtroom. The guard approached the man and asked him to identify himself. He said he was an agent at ICE. The guard told him to stop taking photographs inside the courthouse.

A few minutes later, ICE agents arrested a high school-age boy outside the courthouse and placed him in handcuffs. Security recognized the teenager and reported the arrest to Superior Court Judge Joseph McBurney, who came outside and told the ICE agents they’d made a mistake and had arrested his high school intern. A heated argument ensued between the judge and men from ICE. After reviewing the boy’s identification, ICE admitted they’d arrested the wrong person and released the student.

Disturbed by the arrest, the boy asked the Judge if he could go home for the day. The judge agreed and offered to drive him. At that point, the ICE agents returned, surrounded the judge’s car, told them to get out and threatened to smash the car windows if they didn’t comply. At that point, the Head of Security Operations for the R.I. Superior Court, Dana Smith, approached the car and told the Judge and the boy to remain in the vehicle. Then Smith confronted the ICE agents, who eventually left the scene without making an arrest.

“This egregious incident underscores both the community’s and the Judiciary’s concerns about how ICE is conducting its operations in Rhode Island,” said Rhode Island Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul A. Suttell.

  • On November 22, as Dr. Vahid Abedini was boarding a flight from Oklahoma City to attend the Middle East Studies Association conference in Washington, DC, he was pulled over by immigration officials, detained and placed in jail.

Dr. Abedini is the Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma’s Boren College of International Studies. He has a valid H-1B visa, a non-immigrant work visa granted to individuals in “specialty occupations,” including higher education faculty.

  • A Border Patrol agent under Gregory Bovino wrote a report using ChatGPT and was texting with “Allmightywhity,” according to bodycam footage reviewed by the Chicago Tribune…

  • The NYPD admitted that it participated in a counterterrorism investigation that spied on a private Signal chat of volunteer observers who were monitoring ICE’s actions inside NYC’s immigration courthouses. Why is Mamdani keeping the leadership of this corrupt department in place?

  • Cato’s David J. Bier on the small number of immigrants detained by ICE who have any kind of criminal record: “Just 5% of people detained by ICE since October 1 have had violent criminal convictions, 3/4 had no criminal convictions at all. Most “criminals” had immigration, traffic, and vice offenses. Not the “worst of the worst”…Not surprisingly,. 1/2 of detainees had no criminal conviction or even pending charges, which are often minor and do not end with a criminal conviction. ICE often arrests these people, actively thwarting their ability to clear their names. Not surprisingly, 70% of ICE deportees had no criminal convictions and again, nearly 43% did not even have criminal charges. Again, the fact that the US doesn’t let people answer for the charges against them shows utter contempt for due process and the rule of law.”

  • A couple of days later, CBS News followed up on Bier’s research, reporting that “fewer than one-third of the individuals arrested by Border Patrol during the Trump administration’s recent immigration enforcement crackdown in Charlotte were classified as criminals, according to an internal DHS document. The government document undermines claims by Trump administration officials who said the crackdown, dubbed Operation Charlotte’s Web, was primarily focused on apprehending immigrants living in the U.S. illegally who also had criminal histories and posed a threat to public safety.”

  • After Sabrina Carpenter objected to the White House’s unauthorized use of her song in a video promoting deportations, calling the pogroms “evil and disgusting,” Trump White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded with invective and slurs: “Here’s a Short n’ Sweet message for Sabrina Carpenter: we won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?”

  • Trump on November 25: “DC hasn’t had a murder in 6 months.”(There have been at least 55 homicides in DC since June…)

  • One day later, Rahmanullah Lakanwal shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard as they patrolled the streets of DC near the Farragut West metro station, a few blocks from the White House, killing one and critically injuring the other.

  • The DC shooter worked with the Kandahar Strike Force, a CIA-backed unit in Afghanistan, and was given asylum in April by the Trump administration in April, but during Trump’s belligerent speech on the shooting, he spewed most of his venom on Somalis in Minnesota!

  • One of Lakanwal’s childhood friends told the NYT that he suffered from mental health issues and was haunted by the killings and maimings of Afghans his unit had conducted: ‘He would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure.'”

  • A fellow member of the DC shooter’s CIA-run unit described to Rolling Stone how Lakanwal felt abandoned by the CIA: “He’d say, ‘I am working nine years or 10 years with [the] U.S. government. [They] never answer my phone [call].’”

  • The DC shooting isn’t an “immigrant” problem. It’s a war problem. In a 2008 study cited by the NYT, 121 military personnel who had returned from tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan were convicted of committing homicides after coming home. The figure is undoubtedly much higher now.

  • How will Trump’s call to deploy 500 more National Guard troops to DC do anything but create more targets for deranged shooters?

  • Sen. Bernie Moreno, the Ohio Republican, has introduced a bill to ban Americans from holding dual citizenship. The bill says that to “preserve the integrity of national citizenship, allegiance to the United States must be undivided.” It’s called the Exclusive Citizenship Act. This xenophobic bill will never pass without an exception for Israel. If it did pass, the IDF and settler movements would both be crippled.

  • Trump’s now going on about stripping the citizenship of anyone (ie, Ilhan the Indomitable) who doesn’t subscribe to the tenets of “Western Civilization.” What’s so great about “Western Civilization,” anyway? In any event, didn’t Lao-Tse, the Buddha, and the Vedics get to most of the core ideas first?

  • Trump’s racist rant at Tuesday’s cabinet meeting/suck-up session:

“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it…Somalia stinks and we don’t want them in our country….Omar is garbage. We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

  • Ilhan Omar, cool as ever: “His obsession with me is creepy. I hope he gets the help he desperately needs.”

  • Note the number of stars the Labor Department flacks put over Lincoln’s head: 11, for the number of states in the Confederate States of America and we know what kind of “labor” they fought to defend.

  • Soon they’ll only be allowing white South Africans to enter the country: “US officials say the Trump administration is considering expanding its ‘travel ban,’ which restricts or bars the entry of nationals from 19 countries to around 30 nations, in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in DC.”

  • Immigrants who Anglicize their names increase their earnings in the US by 30% or more, according to research from the University of Oslo.

+++

  • Larry Summers has received a lifetime ban from the American Economic Association for the embarrassment to the profession caused by the disclosure of his intimate association with Jeffrey Epstein. Too bad they didn’t ban him decades ago for the misery he inflicted on the poor through his austerity-driven economic policies.

  • The Kobeissi Letter:

The US economy lost -6,000 manufacturing jobs in September, marking the 5th consecutive monthly contraction. During this period, manufacturing jobs have dropped by -58,000, to 12.71 million, the lowest since March 2022. Since the start of 2024, manufacturing jobs have seen 12 monthly declines. Overall, manufacturing jobs have fallen by -194,000 since the February 2023 peak. Meanwhile, transportation and warehousing employment plunged by -25,000 in September, to 6.71 million, the lowest since November 2024.

  • An important message on the economy from the paper owned by the World’s third-richest man.

  • From 2018-2024, Delta Airlines got a $375 million tax refund, meaning the world’s richest airline paid a negative five percent tax rate, according to reporting by Americans for Tax Fairness.

  • Bloomberg: Unemployed Americans with 4-year college degrees now make up a record 25.3% of total unemployment.

  • Black Friday saw a 9 percent increase in people making purchases using Buy Now, Pay Later. The use of these loans was especially strong among younger consumers: 41% of shoppers aged 16–24 used and younger millennials increased their usage by 87% over last year. But 25% of Buy-Now, Pay-Later users are also now relying on it to finance groceries.

  • The New York Federal Reserve Bank reported that Americans’ household debt levels, including mortgages, car loans, credit cards and student loans, have reached a new record high.

  • The WSJ reports that since 2005, real estate developers and private equity interests in New York City have converted nearly 30 million square feet of office space into residential living, nearly all of it unaffordable to the vast majority of New Yorkers…

  • The Federal Reserve reported this week that the wealth of the top 1% of Americans has hit a record $52 trillion, an increase of 10% over last year.

  • According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the Trump administration’s plan to cut the wage rate for seasonal agricultural jobs under the H-2A visa program will end up reducing pay for all farmworkers: “By lowering wage rates implemented by the Department of Labor, we estimate that over 350,000 H-2A farmworkers could see their annual wages cut by a total of $2 billion or more—between 26% to 32% of their wages. These significant wage cuts for H-2A workers will put downward pressure on the wages of U.S. farmworkers, reducing their total annual wages by about $3 billion—up to 9% of their total wages. Total losses in pay for all farmworkers will range from $4.4 to $5.4 billion—roughly 10% to 12% of their total wages—according to our estimates.”

  • WSJ on House Republicans’ reluctance to renew subsidies for Obamacare: “Speaker Mike Johnson recently cautioned the White House that most House Republicans don’t have an appetite for extending enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies. The message from Johnson, in a phone call with administration officials, came as President Trump’s advisers were drafting a healthcare plan that extended the subsidies for two years.” Appetite!

  • Tell it to the poor of Wyoming, Mike, which leads the nation in Obamacare price hikes, with premiums set to rise 421% percent as ACA subsidies expire. According to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation: “In Wyoming, a 60-year-old person earning roughly $63,000 is facing a 421% increase in average monthly premium costs on the ACA marketplace.”

  • Among Latinos – “Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions…”

Worse: 61% Better: 15% No effect: 22%

Pew Research / Oct 16, 2025

  • Greed is good, again! Trump pardoned another white collar criminal this week, David Gentile, who had been found guilty for his role in a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.

Reporter: Why did the president commute the sentence of a private equity executive, who served 12 days out of a seven-year sentence, which the prosecution said he defrauded $1.6 billion from thousands of victims, including veterans, farmers, and teachers? Why was he pardoned?

Leavitt: This is another example that has been brought to the president’s attention of a weaponization of justice from the previous administration and therefore he signed this commutation.

  • Gentile ripped off 10,000 people….the initial 7-year sentence was light for a crime that sent Bernie Madoff to prison for life. Under Trump’s pardon, he won’t even have to pay fines or restitution.

  • Tarek Mansour, CEO and co-founder of Kalshi, a prediction market that promotes betting on real-world events, said the company’s long-term goal “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” Can’t wait…

  • Apparently, no one told Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy about the Shrinking Pizza Theory of the Economy….

  • Over the last thirty years, the US has lost more than 3,000 newspapers.

  • Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum: “This year, to give you an idea, the additional revenue collection is about 400 billion pesos. Do you know how much Argentina asked the United States for a loan? That amount: 20 billion dollars. And we raised it this year, without raising taxes, simply by doing the job well.”

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  • In 2008, climate models predicted the world would pass 1.5 °C of warming in 2048. Today, the best estimate is 2029.

  • After pushback from the real estate industry, “Zillow “quietly removed” climate risk estimates from over one million listings…

  • Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro, the genocide defender many Democratic Party elites want to run for president in 2028, pulled his state out of a climate pact many other Blue states, including Virginia, under new governor Abigail Stanberger, have joined…

  • The Guardian on the rapid depletion of the planet’s groundwater:

“Groundwater poverty has become one of the major issues in climate change, with cities throughout the world sinking through a combination of frequent droughts, heavy stormwater running off without replenishing the underwater storage and megacities drawing too much Artesian water. It is a problem which immediately affects large centres of population, eventually making them uninhabitable. And now huge swathes of southern Europe, home to millions of people for thousands of years, are under severe and immediate threat.”

  • Solar power generation in Texas is up 40 percent over last year.

  • According to a piece in Forbes, it seems like Trump’s campaign to halt the transition to renewable energy sources are failing:

In the third quarter, USA spending on clean energy and transportation jumped 8% from a year ago to $75 billion, the highest quarterly amount ever. And so far this year, such investments are running 6% ahead of the first three quarters of 2024.

  • More than 520 toxic chemicals have been detected in English soil samples, including long-banned medical substances.

  • Less than 3 percent of the plastic waste generated in the US is recycled.

  • Global number of farmed animals…

Pigs: 779 million Cattle: 1.55 billion Chickens: 33 billion Fish: 125 billion Shrimp: 230 billion

  • It was sunny in the Gorge this morning, but cold, with a bitter east wind blowing in our faces for three miles out and down our spines for three miles back. But Our Little Mountain looked glorious under her new coating of snow and the cottonwoods along the Columbia were shimmering more brightly than the Home Depot bric-a-brac superglued to the walls of the Oval Office…

Mt. Hood rising over the Columbia River Gorge. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

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  • The New York Times story about Trump’s flagging energy and chronic health issues was co-written by Katie Rogers and Dylan Freedman, but Trump only targeted Rogers in his churlish latest tirade, calling her “ugly inside and out.”

  • John Bourscheid: “Never ask: A woman her age. A man his salary. The White House why the president is getting a secret medical procedure that makes him unable to do public appearances for the first three days of every month since September.”

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