TRUMP IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

As 2026 begins, I know I'm supposed to be pleased that President Trump's poll numbers are bad and Democrats have been winning off-year elections by large margins. That's all good -- but it's not enough.

Republicans are on offense. Republicans are always on offense, no matter how unpopular they are. They've made fraud in Minnesota a national news story, and now Trump, not content with feeezing federal aid to daycare centers in Minnesota, is doing it nationwide. He and his administration hope that people in the other 49 states will blame Tim Walz and Somalis in Minnesota for this, rather than the president himself for imposing collective punishment. This might backfire, but it might not. (Maybe some Democrats should start using the phrase "collective punishment," or a more Instagram-friendly synonym, in order to direct the outrage where it belongs.)

I know that most people think the Republican Party is a personality cult led by a man who's experiencing age-related decline and alienating millions of voters. But the Republican Party is more than just Trump. In this story, he's following the lead of younger Republicans.

Please pay attention to the timeline:

On November 21, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that he was “immediately” terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somali immigrants in Minnesota.... About 705 Somalis are on that programme.

Without providing evidence, Trump claimed that “Somali gangs are terrorising the people of that great State” and accused Governor Walz, without proof, of overseeing a state that had become a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity”....

Trump’s accusations about the Somali community come after a conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, published allegations of welfare fraud against Somalis in Minnesota in a magazine called City Journal on November 19.

Rufo was actually a co-author of this piece, with Ryan Thorpe. A story in The Minnesota Star Tribune makes clear that there's no real evidence for Thorpe and Rufo's most explosive allegation: that money from aid programs was funneled to the terrorist group al-Shabab. But the story got around, and Trump joined in the effort to make it go national, an effort he didn't initiate. Trump is often a follower rather than a leader in GOP propaganda campaigns, and Rufo is often a leader. Trump wasn't talking about DEI or "transgender for everybody," as he likes to put it, until Rufo and the GOP propaganda machine put those subjects on the national agenda.

Eventually the Minnesota story was catapulted further by a GOP-propagandist video maker named Nick Shirley. Again, Trump didn't lead -- he followed.

You'll argue that none of this could break through without Trump's ability to command the attention of his cult. My response is that a similar propaganda campaign brought down the liberal group ACORN in 2009. Who was the cult leader of the GOP then? Did the GOP even have a leader?

In a Bluesky thread, Dave Weigel reminds us of that this is an old story and shouldn't be a national scandal:

In 2022, the Biden DOJ filed the first charges against dozens of fraudsters, many of them Somali-American, who'd fleeced a state food aid program.

This happened right as early voting began in state elections; voters re-elected Gov. Walz and gave Democrats a trifecta. It was a damaging scandal, but hardly covered up. Rs whacked at it when Walz became VP nominee, but it didn't become a decisive issue.

Fast-forward to now, and to that video:

Conservative influencer Nick Shirley ... goes to one dodgy-looking daycare (the sign on the front misspells "learning") and films panicky employees who won't let them in. He promotes this as having personally uncovered $100 million of fraud.

The WH, House GOP, Elon etc circulate the video, often thanking Shirley for finally doing the work the media and Democrats refused to do. Video gets 100m+ views.

... step back and look at the machinery and you see how sturdy this media/WH infrastructure is. If they want to make a humiliating Democratic scandal the biggest story in the country, they can do it.

It doesn't matter that the fraud was being probed. It doesn't matter that the federal investigation of this fraud started in 2021, the year Joe Biden became president. Republicans have a propaganda machine that can mold the truth, one that doesn't rely on Trump. When Republicans think they have a good story, everyone in the party works together.

We should keep trying to weaken Trump, and hope he continues to damage himself. But it's not enough. We need to weaken the GOP messaging apparatus -- or counter it with strong messaging of our own. Otherwise, this will just keep happening forever, no matter how weak Trump becomes or how well Democrats do in elections.

IS TRUMP REALLY A NATURAL DISASTER?

Yesterday I ran across this discussion between Megan McArdle of The Washington Post and Kat Rosenfield of The Free Press.

Real "oh my god, she admit it" moment here. Trump is treated as an uninteresting figure without agency so we can dump endless criticism on liberals for how they react to his "natural disaster." He "doesn't participate in moral frameworks" lmfao

[image or embed]

— Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 (@josephpolitano.bsky.social) December 30, 2025 at 1:28 PM

(The original discussion is here if you want to read more from these folks. I don't.)

Unlike Joey Politano, I think McArdle and Rosenfield are half-right: Trump's character flaws ("flaws" is too mild a word for Trump's off-the-charts amorality) and America's right-wing partisans really do make moral shaming of Trump ineffective. Mostly it's Trump. He wallows in evil. He thinks evil runs the world. He also thinks evil is fun. I sometimes think he marries women just so he can have the pleasure of cheating on them; I think he'd rather make a dishonest dollar than an honest one. It occurs to me that he hasn't become Hitler or Stalin -- a dictator who has completely crushed all opposition parties, all opposition from the legal system, and all opposition from the media and ordinary citizens -- because having opponents to defeat is what gives his life flavor and meaning.

And I think Rosenfield is on to something when she calls Trump "a natural disaster in human form," if only because our system has allowed him to be as unchecked as a Category 5 hurricane. But she's missing an obvious point about natural disasters, which is that we don't just deal with them after they've been through.

Before a natural disaster, we board up windows, we evacuate, we pre-position supplies for relief efforts. Taking a few steps further back, we require buildings to be capable of withstanding diasters. And then after the fact, we need to do a better job than George W. Bush and his FEMA director did after Hurricane Katrina. I think that's what Rosenfield means.

But if you want to compare Trump to a phenomenon that can't be reasoned with, I'd choose a disease outbreak, not a natural disaster. Like Trump, natural disasters leave devastation in their wake that might take years or even decades to clean up, if it's ever fully cleaned up at all, but natural disasters pass -- hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods don't linger for months or years.

Disease outbreaks linger. They're amoral, like natural diasters or like Trump, but unlike natural disasters (and like Trump), they just keep going. What's important is "how everyone else deals with the carnage."

But we can anticipate disease epidemics and pandemics, just the way we were largely able to anticipate the horrible things Trump would do to America. We had the ability to vaccinate our system against Trump -- we had the Constitution, we had separation of powers, we had a free press. We had laws limiting a president's powers.

We could have educated a sufficient number of people to prevent the disease from ever getting a foothold in America, but we failed at that. Then, when the disease hit, Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court acted as the Robert Kennedy Juniors of our political system, thwarting any attempt to keep our body politic healthy. (The Supreme Court started in on that even before Trump won his second term.) The mainstream press wasn't sufficiently alarmed. The Democratic Party establishment cowered in a corner, hoping the disease would burn itself out.

Ordinary citizens and a few brave political actors are working hard to limit the worst consequences of the disease. But it's still spreading.

Rosenfield and McArdle think it's pointless to appeal to Trump's morality or empathy, and they're right. But this natural diaster, this deadly disease epidemic, has done untold damage because people like McArdle and Rosenfield aren't appealing to the morality or empathy of Trump's enablers, or the voters who enable the enablers, and haven't found a way to make them change their behavior. Many of the enablers -- Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, and dozens of others -- are as cold-blooded as the man they serve. Others, probably correctly, fear no consequences -- they know that as long as a rock-solid Republican propaganda apparatus keeps the GOP in power (or at least gives it permanent veto power, either in the courts or via the Senate filibuster), they'll remain powerful players and never fear legal consequences.

Can we ever make the enablers accountable? Can we limit their ability to be disease vectors?

I'm not sure, but we should try. McArdle and Rosenfield should try. But of course they won't.

"BUT DEMOCRATS ARE WORSE": WHY TRUMP WON'T EVEN BOTHER TO ADDRESS VOTERS' DISSATISFACTION IN 2026

Here were the top stories at FoxNews.com at 9:15 this morning:

I don't know what to make of the lead story. It says,

A report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently revealed billions in taxpayer funds that went to "questionable" rental assistance recipients under former President Joe Biden....

HUD officials told the Post that a "large concentration" of the funds went to New York, California and Washington, D.C., with deceased recipients getting funds in all 50 states.

The story cites a 183-page HUD report claiming " questionable payments totaling $5.8 billion" in fiscal year 2024 -- but this is reported under the heading "OTHER INFORMATION (UNAUDITED)." Would a formal audit reveal that much of this "questionable" funding was legitimate? Is this a greater or lesser amount of "questionable" funding than in other years? And if a "large concentration" of the "questionable" funds went to evil liberal hellholes -- New York, California, Washington -- why do we need to hear it from unnamed HUD officials? Why isn't that in the report?

The two stories below this one focus on reported fraud in Minnesota -- the right's favorite story at this moment. Tim Walz! Somalis! It's got everything right-wingers hate.

This is how you know that the White House and congressional Republicans have no interest in addressing the issue of affordability in 2026. The right-wing press works hand in glove with the GOP, and the message here is clear: You think Trump is why you feel broke? Nahhh. It's Democrats who are really picking your pockets!

The Republican message going into 2026 is what it always is whenever the GOP is vulnerable: But Democrats are worse. Republicans might not be solving America's problems, but Democrats are taking heartlanders' money and giving it dishonestly to Those People.

I don't think this can do more than establish a floor for the GOP's popularity, but it might limit the party's losses in the House and might help save the Senate for the GOP, and it will probably keep Trump's approval rating from permanently slipping below 40%.

Republicans gave up on selling their economic agenda a while back. For decades, they've wanted to slash the social safety net, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, so they can give more and more money to the rich and to large corporations. Fifteen or twenty years ago, they still believed they could persuade Americans to go along with this agenda, telling us that America needed to have "an adult conversation about entitlements," or words to that effect. Americans weren't having it. The country rebelled against Social Security privatization during the George W. Bush presidency. A proposed "grand bargain" in the Barack Obama years never happened. Republicans stopped trying to sell their agenda directly.

Now they try to win every election with culture war. But they got Roe overturned already. They have trans people under assault in red states, and some Democrats are abandoning them in blue states, but an emphasis on the alleged trans menance failed spectacularly for the GOP in the Virginia gubernatorial election last month.

And the Donald Trump/Stephen Miller war against immigrants has led to a backlash, with, as Gallup reported this summer, "a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say[ing] immigration is a good thing for the country."

What can Republicans do when their usual cultural attacks seem stale and tired? In theory, they could change their economic positions -- but that's unthinkable for the party of the Koch network and fascist techno-libertarians like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

So they're going to keep running nationwide against Tim Walz, Joe Biden, Zohran Mamdani, and other Democrats who won't appear on congressional ballots next year. And for Fox viewers at least, it will undoubtedly work.

WE NEED TO RESIST THE SANEWASHING OF J.D. VANCE

I don't know if you've noticed, but the race for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination appears to be over already, and J.D. Vance has won. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Uninterested in a competitive Republican primary in 2028, Turning Point USA plans to deploy representatives across Iowa’s 99 counties in the coming months to build the campaign infrastructure it believes could deliver Vance, a Midwesterner from nearby Ohio, a decisive victory, potentially short-circuiting a fractious GOP race, insiders said.

It is the latest move in a quiet effort by some in Trump’s orbit to clear the field of viable competitors. Earlier this month, Marco Rubio, the secretary of State previously floated by Trump as a possible contender, appeared to take himself out of the running.

“If Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair.

And Axios says (free to read here):

Vice President JD Vance plans to literally fly above MAGA's rising civil war — campaigning coast to coast in the midterms and sticking close to President Trump, while building support for an expected presidential run in 2028.

Polling this early in a presidential cycle is usually meaningless, but Vance has an overwhelming lead right now -- 37.8 points in the Real Clear Polling average. He's at 48.8% and no other potential candidate is in double digits except for Donald Trump Jr., who's at 11%. But Junior is a friend and ally of Vance's, and he's making no obvious 2028 moves. In fact, no other Republican appears to be making 2028 moves -- not Junior, not Rubio, not Nikki Haley or Glenn Youngkin or Ron DeSantis or even Marjorie Taylor Greene. Many Democrats are making moves, but in the GOP, only Vance seems to be serious about the next election.

I know you all think it's hilarious that Turning Point, now headed by Erika Kirk, is all in on Vance. I'm sure you think Vance's marriage is a sham and he and Erika Kirk are doing the deed.

They might be, but I'm going to toss out a conspiracy theory I made up and half-believe: Vance wants you to think he's fucking Erika. He wants you to think he'll soon dump Usha, his Indian-American wife, and marry the blond Aryan widow. He knows that Christian conservatives don't really care whether their heroes are faithful husbands -- their two favorite presidents, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, are the only two divorced presidents we've ever had -- while the racists in the party really do care about Vance's marriage to a woman of non-European descent. Would Vance fake infidelity just to keep the racists in his coalition? Would his wife go along with the gambit, even going so far as to appear publicly without her wedding ring, just to advance his career? Who knows? It seems far-fetched, but I wouldn't put anything past the Vances and the grieving widow.

I'm old enough to remember Ross Perot, the billionaire who ran for president twice in the 1990s. He leaned right and appealed to many of the same kinds of voters who flocked to Donald Trump, but he regularly said one very admirable thing: "If you hate people, I don't want your vote." Approaching 2028, Vance is telling voters: If you hate people, hell yeah I want your vote.

Closing out the [recent] Turning Point USA conference, Vance called for party unity amid escalating conflicts among right-wing influencers over the acceptability of racism and antisemitism within Republican politics.

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” Vance said. “Every American is invited. We don’t care if you’re white or Black, rich or poor, young or old, rural or urban, controversial or a little bit boring, or somewhere in between.”

Perot very clearly said that not every American was invited to his coalition. But Vance welcomes the haters.

I think Vance welcomes the haters for the obvious reason that he's a hater himself, a man who has championed German neo-Nazis, defended young Republicans who engaged in extremely racist group chats, and slandered Haitian immigrants as dog-eaters, all while following multiple racist accounts on social media.

But I see him on the verge of being sanewashed by the mainstream press.

Here's Axios:

Vance has no intention of taking sides in the civil war among celebrity MAGA podcasters, who are fighting bitterly and publicly over antisemitism and America's role abroad.

The feuds were a backdrop for Vance's appearance earlier this month at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest, where he condemned "endless, self-defeating purity tests," and said he "didn't bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform."

Republicans close to Vance say he knows it makes no sense to antagonize any MAGA faction so far in advance of the 2028 primary. Vance, who was close friends with Charlie Kirk, has made opposition to censorship a key part of his political identity.

One person familiar with Vance's thinking said he's working to be a "voice of unity against the left."

When Vance's open embrace of bigots and bigotry is treated as nothing more than a campaign stragtegy, that's sanewashing. We have to fight hard to ensure that the media doesn't succeed in normalizing this extremely hate-filled man.

I worry that this kind of coverage will make Vance seem acceptable to centrist swing voters. Many people think he's too dull to be a successful candidate, but after eight years of Trump -- twelve, really -- normie voters will probably want a pendulum swing back to boring and polished, and might be persuaded that Vance is the soft-spoken stylistic alternative to Trump that America needs, all while angry Republicans see in him the hate and inner rage they crave.

(I agree that Vance can't energize the Republican base the way Trump does, but I think the base feels his anger and responds to it. He isn't charismatic or grandiose the way Trump is, but I think he's a sort of Tom Ripley character -- cold-blooded and evil -- and the GOP base likes that.)

In order to keep normies on the hook, Vance had to defend his wife against a recent racist attack by the Hitler-loving podcaster Nick Fuentes -- but Vance triangulated, saying:

On Fuentes, I’ve criticized him in the past, but let me be clear: anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat s---. That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States.

Vance paired Fuentes's name with the name of an MS NOW commentator, placing her name first and thus suggesting that what they said was equally vile (or Psaki's attack was worse). So what did they say? Psaki appeared on the I've Had It podcast and said this:

“I think the little Manchurian candidate, JD Vance, wants to be president more than anything else,” opined Psaki. “I always wonder what’s going on in the mind of his wife. Like, are you okay? Please blink four times, we’ll-, come over here. We’ll save you.”

But Fuentes said this:

“And now they’re all in favor of a fat, race mixer who’s married to a jeet, who named his son Vivek ... and that’s your guy? Your guy is literally a fat, gay race traitor who married a jeet ...” Fuentes said, using a racial slur for Indians.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes attacks Usha Vance using anti-Indian racial slurs

This is a man who had a private dinner with Trump in 2022 at his resort pic.twitter.com/X0EQe3xhEZ

— Shashank Mattoo (@MattooShashank) November 1, 2025

Maybe it's just me, but if you used a word that's become analogous to the n-word and applied it to my wife, then brought my child into it, I'd be a lot angrier than I would be at Psaki's insult. I wouldn't equate the two. And I'd recognize that the racist insult was much worse for America than Psaki's snark.

But it gets worse. Fuentes subsequently doubled down, portraying "eat shit" as a literal dinner invitation in a vile way:

After JD Vance said in an interview published Monday that Fuentes can “eat s---” for his remarks, Fuentes disparaged Indian culture on his podcast....

“I really appreciate the invitation. It’s very gracious. I’ve said a lot of negative things about JD Vance, so for him to extend an invitation like that to me to have dinner, a traditional Indian dinner with him and his family, it actually moved me, it actually touched me a little bit,” Fuentes said.

“I said I’ve been nothing but antagonistic to this guy, really unprovoked – I started the beef. And so for him, in the spirit of the holiday and the spirit of Christmas, for him to extend an invitation in public like that to enjoy a traditional Indian dinner prepared by his wife with his family at the Naval Observatory – he’s a better man than me and I gotta give him a lot of credit for that. Credit where it is due," Fuentes said....

“But respectfully, I must decline. That’s sort of the whole point. I don’t want to eat s---.

“We don’t want them here because we don’t want to eat s---. I know they do that in India. I know they literally eat cow s---, I know that they will scratch their a—and then prepare food and eat s--- that way also," he said.

“We don’t want them here because we don’t eat s--- in America. We try to avoid eating s--- as much as possible. It’s why we wash our hands. So, respectfully, I will have to decline. Thank you, but no thank you. I will not be eating s---. I wish you the best on your Christmas Eve dinner. I hope that goes well for you guys.”

"Every American is invited" to Vance's coalition, the vice president says -- even the man who said this about Vance's wife and Indians everywhere.

LIBERALS ARE EVIL, ACCORDING TO THESE RULES WE JUST MADE UP

Hi -- I had some weather-related travel interruptions, but I'm back. Thank you, Yas, for great work while I was away.

In my absence, I see that the right found a couple more reasons why liberals are evil: they violate rules and norms the right made up.

One evil liberal is Chuck Redd:

The Kennedy Center says it plans to file a $1 million lawsuit against jazz artist Chuck Redd, after the musician canceled his annual Christmas Eve performance. The Associated Press first reported that Redd pulled out of the show days after President Trump's name was added to the exterior of the performing arts center in Washington, D.C.

Redd violated a rule of the performing arts that a government spokesperson appears to have invented:

In an email to NPR on Saturday, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said Redd's decision is a disservice to the arts.

"Any artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn't courageous or principled—they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people," she said.

Did you know that it's "the basic duty of a public artist ... to perform for all people"? I didn't -- and if it is, then the Beatles, who had a rider in their performing contract stating that they must "not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience," and who threatened to cancel a 1964 show in Jacksonville, Florida, if the audience was segregated, violated the rule. So did Frank Sinatra, who championed civil rights for many years and refused to sing for segregated audiences -- yes, Stephen Miller's hero.

Watched the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas with my kids.

Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) December 26, 2025

(Sinatra and Martin were, of course, the children of immigrants from Italy, a country many Americans believed was not sending its best during the wave of Italian immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.)

I'd also point out that while Kid Rock didn't really say that he's refusing to perform in New York City in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani's election as mayor, there's been no backlash to the rumor -- no one on the right appears to believe that he has a "basic duty ... to perform for all people."

The president of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, invented another accusation against Redd:

In a post on X on Friday, Grenell wrote: "The left is boycotting the Arts because Trump is supporting the Arts. But we will not let them cancel shows without consequences. The Arts are for everyone - and the Left is mad about it."

Does Redd want to deny art to conservatives? No.

According to a Kennedy Center online biography, Redd has been involved with The Smithsonian for more than two decades, serving as artist-in residence at The Smithsonian Jazz Café from 2004-2008. The Kennedy Center is part of the Smithsonian Institution.

That means he maintained ties to the Smithsonian during George W. Bush's presidency and Trump's first term.

We also have Elon Musk making up a rule about New York mayoral appointees:

Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Friday slammed New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (D) for appointing a non-firefighter to lead the city’s fire department.

“People will die because of this. Proven experience matters when lives are at stake,” the former White House adviser wrote in a post on the social platform X, which he controls.

Mamdani's appointee is Lillian Bonsignore, who seems to have a lot of relevant experience:

The mayor-elect defended the appointment:

Experience does matter, which is why I appointed the person who spent more than 30 years at EMS. You know, the workforce that addresses at least 70% of all calls coming into FDNY? https://t.co/shTYVvvy4C

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) December 27, 2025

I haven't verified this, but Musk's own AI platform says that 22 New York City fire commissioners had no firefighting experience:

The outgoing mayor, Eric Adams, has appointed two fire commissioners who were never firefighters, apparently without offending Musk's sense of propriety. Laura Kavanaugh, who held the job from 2022 to 2024, had experience in emergency response but hadn't fought fires:

Prior to her appointment as Fire Commissioner, Kavanagh spent several years with the FDNY, involved in the agency's response to major incidents including the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.... Kavanagh's tenure as commissioner was met with opposition by rank-and-file members of the FDNY based on her relatively young age, lack of any experience as a first responder and allegations of her department's demoting older and more experienced fire chiefs.

A subsequent appointee, Robert Tucker, who served for more than a year in 2024 and 2025, had no relevant experience whatsoever, but appeared to appeal to Adams for ... um, other reasons:

Following law school, Tucker worked as special assistant to the District Attorney in Queens County....

In 1999 Tucker became chairman and CEO of T&M Protection Resources, a company specializing in security, intelligence and investigations....

Tucker was appointed FDNY fire commissioner by New York City Mayor Eric Adams on August 12, 2024. Six weeks before Tucker was appointed FDNY commissioner, eight employees of Tucker’s former business made political contributions to Adams on the same day.... Tucker has never been a firefighter or emergency response official. He is a self-described "fire buff" who cites his time as a young boy chasing fire engines as inspiration for his service.

Tucker very showily resigned as fire commissioner immediately after Mamdani was elected, citing Mamdani's criticism of Israel, and gave his first interview to Bari Weiss's CBS News a couple of weeks later.

I'd also like to remind Musk that the first fire commissioner appointed by Rudy Giuliani, the right's favorite New York mayor, was Howard Safir, who also had no experience as a firefighter -- his career prior to his appointment was all in law enforcement, at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

So Mamdani violated a made-up rule, which right-wingers will invoke if any fire in New York during his tenure is handled with less 100% skill. And Chuck Redd is facing a lawsuit, which ought to inspire some activism:

If I were a wealthy, commercially successful non-Trump Kennedy Center honoree, I would very publicly offer to pay 100% of Redd's legal fees, all the way up to the Supreme Court, as well as any fines imposed.

[image or embed]

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 27, 2025 at 8:41 PM

Past Kennedy Center honorees include Robert De Niro, Barbra Streisand, and Bruce Springsteen. What do you say, folks?

Holiday Reading: Jon Swift Memorial

 

One of the meanings of Italian "batocchio": The thing you use to whack your Tibetan therapeutic singing bowl, in black chamois and wood, with wooden bowl, €49.90 from macrolibrarsi.

Oh, hell, the gang's all here! OG blogger Batocchio has mounted the annual Jon Swift Roundup for 2025, honoring the late Jon Swift/Al Weiser and the ghosts of blogs past and blogs present and Blogmas yet to come, and the blogiverse itself, such as it is gathering the bloggers' best posts of the year, in the bloggers' opinion (and we're nothing if not opinionated!). So pay it a visit!

Epstein Narratology

 

Not finding a credit for this widespread image. Can't reach the T-shirt company, Picturestees, that was selling it at Halloween.

Everybody loves a good Christmas ghost story, and I don't mean the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, but something a lot darker, the kind of ghost story that offers a real chill without a compensatory sweetness. This one is maybe altogerther too creepy, in fact, especially in the sense that you can easily imagine it's true, though that's unlikely. It's about that postcard that showed up in the Epstein document dump yesterday, purportedly addressed by Jeffrey Epstein shortly before his death to the notorious child molester Larry Nassar, the team doctor of the women's national gymnastics team, who assaulted the young athletes under his care for years before he was finally stopped:

Dear L.N.

As you know by now, I have taken the “short route” home. Good luck! We shared one thing … our love and caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential.

Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to “grab snatch,” whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.

Life is unfair.

Yours

J. Epstein

Some time after the documents went on line, Department of Justice issued a statement on this one, to the effect that it was conducting an inquiry about its authenticity, about which there were some reasonable doubts: the card had been mailed from Virginia, not from the jail in New York where Epstein was being held, gave an incorrect name for the jail in the return address (it also had the wrong prison for Nassar, who thus never received it), and was processed three days after Epstein died on August 10, 2019.

Also, the authenticity had come into question before: another document in the dump tells how the card was returned to the jail (September 25), and made its way to the FBI investigation of Epstein's death; nearly a year later, they sent the letter to the lab with a request for a handwriting analysis. The request was posted yesterday, but DOJ hasn't posted the analysis itself, or the samples of Epstein's handwriting that had been sent with it. (Indeed, it's extremely hard to find an example of Epstein's handwriting; at least, I haven't succeeded in doing it.)

A couple of hours after that, though, DOJ did post a notice that the card was a fake, for the reasons cited, and because "the writing does not appear to match Jeffrey Epstein's."

That's when I started getting suspicious. They had to look at the analysis, presumably, to determine that; why didn't they post it? Unless, of course, they were lying, as if Pamela Jo Bondi's Justice Department would ever do something like that!

Bye, Elise

 

21st congressional district, New York, via Wikipedia,

Some gossip, mostly from a caller from New York's 21st congressional district, on the radio WNYC Brian Lehrer, unable to link at the moment), about Rep. Elise Stefanik: that she's never liked the district, the state's largest geographically and most sparsely populated and of course poorest, if only because it's too cold, not too mention plagued by awful unemployment and alcohol and drug abuse. She's not even from there but from Albany; she's a carpetbagger, claiming residence on the basis of what upstaters call a "camp", or summer place, owned by her parents. She hasn't done a town hall for six years, and in what the local press categorized as a "rare visit" for a ceremonial function in August, to Plattsburgh, the booing stopped her from addressing a crowd consisting mostly of anti-Trumpers:

"Well, Elise has not shown up in our district for months and months," said protester Mavis Agnew. "She won't hold a town hall, she won't take questions. She's never in her office. People show up at her office constantly, door's closed. Her representatives, her employees won't talk to her... So this was her first appearance, the first opportunity we had to let her know we're unhappy."

She got a more positive response in February, but that was what was advertised as her farewell tour, when she was expecting to leave the House for a stint as US ambassador. Then, when Trump ordered her to stay in Congress instead to protect his razor-thin majority, a visit to Saranac Lake celebrating a federal grant for the firehouse (in an appropriation signed by President Biden) was received with "mixed emotions".

The other thing is, the district isn't inevitably Republican; it was held by Democrat Bill Owens, defeating a GOP torn by culture war issues, from 2009 through 2015, and voted for Obama twice, along with Schumer and Gillibrand (whose 20th congressional district overlapped a good deal with where the 21st is today).

Her dropping out of the governor's race is pretty easy to understand: she was certain to win the Republican primary, but very likely to lose the general election, and certain to lose, at least as long as Trump refused to endorse her, which he did for his own Trumpy reasons; perhaps he was mad at her for even considering giving up the congressional seat, like she valued herself more than him. You can see how that would be hard for him to take. Whatever happens to her next, she's certainly an instance of the Trump Curse. I"m sure she'd love a job in Washington, but I really feel she's headed for being relatively alive on the proverbial Farm Upstate. 

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.