Comments

  1. birgerjohansson says

    Six mass shootings in 24 hours, in Texas, Louisiana, Michigan & North Carolina.
    But don’t worry, the president is on the case.
    So he is sending troops to Portland, Oregon.

    .
    Jon Stewart:
    “Trump Sends Troops to Portland & Shootings Trigger Left-Right Blame Game ”
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=k8j3N7dEwzY
    Also, the president sees stuff on TV because TV is better than, you know, experts.

  3. birgerjohansson says

    BTW, I thought it was ze Joos that were hogging the Medbeds that can make you younger. Trump is confusing the bad guys.

  6. StevoR says

    Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has outmanoeuvred yet another American president.

    For all US President Donald Trump’s boasts about ending wars and being a worthy candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize, when his moment came to end the war in Gaza and build a sustainable future for both Israelis and Palestinians, he failed. At least for now.

    As the two men announced this so-called peace plan, not a single Arab leader was in the room. That says everything.

    … (snip)…

    ..Announcing his plan, Mr Trump never once mentioned the need for Israel to end its military occupation of the Palestinians or the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

    Israel’s occupation is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and until it is addressed — and ended — anything else is a band-aid.

    A band-aid is better than nothing, but with gaping wounds in a patient, there’s a limit to what a band-aid can do.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-30/netanyahu-has-outmanoeuvred-yet-another-american-president/105833774

  8. StevoR says

    A government shutdown would force NASA to scale back most of its activities, sending the majority of its workforce home without pay. Only a small number of essential personnel would remain, tasked with protecting mission-critical assets such as spacecraft in orbit, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and other safety operations, while most research and development would come to a halt.

    NASA’s contingency plan, as outlined in its shutdown FAQs from 2018, emphasizes that only “activities which are necessary to prevent harm to life or property” are exempt from being affected. So, without a funding bill by the end of Sept. 30 — the end of the current fiscal year — agency offices will close, labs will go quiet and most of NASA’s employees will find themselves facing a furlough.

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/how-would-a-government-shutdown-affect-nasa

    Just when NASA is already facing a cut of about half its total budget and morale is already at rock bottom there.

  9. StevoR says

    Wind speeds on Mars are high enough to blow fleets of large spherical rovers that resemble tumbleweed across the Red Planet’s surface, according to new wind-tunnel tests of small prototypes conducted by an international consortium of young scientists.

    “We now have experimental validation that tumbleweed rovers could indeed operate and collect scientific data on Mars,” James Kingsnorth of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and head of science at Team Tumbleweed said..

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/mars-rovers/tumbleweed-inspired-mars-rovers-could-be-blown-across-the-red-planet

  10. says

    As shutdown deadline arrives, Trump pushes racist and vulgar deepfake targeting Democrats

    “With time running out, the president thought it’d be good to target Democrats with a video that was equal parts vulgar, racist and dishonest.”

    Related video at the link.

    Three years into Barack Obama’s first term, as House Republicans pushed the nation closer to a government shutdown, Donald Trump spoke up and urged the public to blame the Democratic president. “If there is a shutdown I think it would be a tremendously negative mark on the president of the United States,” he told NBC News. “He’s the one that has to get people together.”

    Fourteen years later, it’s Trump who’s in the White House, demonstrating his own unique approach to getting people together to prevent a shutdown. The New York Times reported:

    President Trump shared an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social, mocking the Democrats’ congressional leaders hours after he met with them in negotiations to avert a government shutdown. The video, which fabricated the voice of Senator Chuck Schumer at a news conference on Monday afternoon, falsely accuses Democrats of trying to give free health care to undocumented immigrants to gain their support. In the video, the Democrats’ House leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who is Black, is pictured with a fake mustache and wearing a sombrero.

    The video was overtly racist — there was nothing subtle about the fake mustache and sombrero — and quite vulgar. Indeed, the clip the president promoted used computer-generated speech to portray Schumer as saying Democrats are “woke pieces of s—.”

    Not surprisingly, Democrats were not amused. Jeffries spoke to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and called the video “disgusting,” before adding, “Bigotry will get you nowhere.” [video]

    At the heart of the ugly video was the idea that Democrats, by fighting to make health care affordable for American families, are secretly trying to fund coverage for undocumented immigrants — a line House Speaker Mike Johnson continued to peddle on Fox News Monday night. [!!]

    He and his party are lying about this, though it’s apparently a key part of the GOP’s shutdown strategy.

    […] Four hours after a White House meeting with congressional leaders and roughly 28 hours before the shutdown deadline, the sitting American president thought it’d be a good idea to amplify an AI-generated video attacking Democrats — whose votes will be needed to resolve the standoff — that was equal parts vulgar, racist and dishonest.

    […] during Trump’s first campaign, he presented himself to voters as a world-class dealmaker who knew exactly how to bring Democrats and Republicans together to reach bipartisan agreements. He was the consummate negotiator, Trump said, who knew what it took to make deals happen.

    A decade later, those boasts have been exposed as a sham. As Schumer summarized in response to the president’s post, “If you think your shutdown is a joke, it just proves what we all know: You can’t negotiate. You can only throw tantrums.”

  11. says

    For the convenience of readers, here are some links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-7/#comment-2279058
    TikTok’s role in broadcasting images of Israel’s war on Gaza and the way that has shifted American public opinion has been central to the pressure campaign that forced this sale.
    The new owners include some of the most prominent pro-Israel billionaires in the US, alongside a fund run by Abu Dhabi’s ruling family.

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-7/#comment-2279033
    Russia’s ban on petrol exports is now extended until the end of the year as shortages continue to hit the domestic market and spread across the regions. Kyiv says that in less than two months, Ukrainian forces struck 85 high-value targets in Russia.

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-7/#comment-2279031
    Congressional leaders leave White House meeting without deal to avoid government shutdown

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-7/#comment-2278977
    Why it was so deeply weird to see Trump amplify ‘medbed’ pseudoscience

  12. says

    YouTube’s $24 million settlement with Trump is part of an unsettling pattern

    “After YouTube banned Trump in the wake of Jan. 6, the Republican filed suit. Now he’s been rewarded with an eight-figure settlement.”

    In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, Donald Trump was short on friends. Congressional Republicans kept their distance; businesses denounced the political violence he instigated; and tech giants scrambled to take down his accounts, fearing that the outgoing president might use their platforms to further destabilize the United States.

    That included YouTube, which banned Trump in the immediate aftermath of his riot at the Capitol, concluding that his channel raised “concerns about the ongoing potential for violence.”

    Trump’s account was reinstated in 2023, but he nevertheless proceeded with a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Alphabet’s Google. This week that case was resolved with a settlement. NBC News reported:

    YouTube said Monday it would settle a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump for more than $24 million, adding to a growing list of settlements with tech and media companies […] A notice of settlement for Trump’s lawsuit against YouTube details that $22 million of it will go toward building a new White House ballroom.

    Soon after the settlement agreement was announced, the president mocked YouTube online and said the 2021 ban was “illegal.” (It was not and the legal dispute was a civil case, not a criminal one.)

    Mark Graber, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Carey School of Law, told The Wall Street Journal, “There is a reason to settle, but it has little to do with the law. The present Supreme Court doctrine is very clear that private companies need not give anyone a right of access.”

    But, Graber added, major companies that are regulated by the Trump administration have a corporate motivation to resolve these disputes: “If you’re Meta or Google, $25 million is lunch money. It is probably worth $25 million in lunch money to make this go away.”

    [I snipped details of other settlements.]

    In each instance, Trump filed dubious lawsuits. In each instance, legal experts offered public commentary that suggested the cases were likely to fail. In each instance, the companies wrote eight-figure checks anyway.

    People who know me often ask whether or not I’m surprised by what Trump and his team have done this year. The answer, in general, is no: I’ve been a little surprised by the speed at which the president and his operation have advanced — traditionally, the authoritarian model doesn’t move quite this quickly — but Trump ran on a radical and undemocratic platform, and he’s now executing those plans.

    What I have been surprised by is how the eager the elite institutions are to appease the president, as law firms, universities and corporate giants capitulate at every turn.

    “One by one, American leaders supposedly committed to principles of free speech, due process, democracy, and equality have abandoned those ideals when menaced by the Trump administration,” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer summarized last week. These cascading acts of cowardice from the people best positioned to resist Trump’s authoritarian power grabs have made Trump seem exponentially more powerful than he actually is, sapping strength from others who might have discovered the courage to stand up. [True]

    “Defending democracy requires a collective refusal to acquiesce to lawless behavior from many different sectors of society. All of these powerful people trying to save their own skin have effectively multiplied Trump’s attacks on constitutional government, by enhancing a false sense of inevitability and invincibility,” Serwer added. [True]

    Former Vice President Kamala Harris told Rachel Maddow last week, “I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions.” I believed that, too. But fear among executives who’ve come to expect politicized agencies and administrative corruption has brought us — swiftly — to this unexpected point.

  13. says

    Trump presses Microsoft to ‘immediately terminate’ Biden administration veteran

    “For the third time in three months, the president has pushed a private-sector giant to fire someone he disliked. The Lisa Monaco example is the most serious.”

    Donald Trump has complained bitterly about Lisa Monaco for years, but late last week, the president went quite a bit further than he has before. NBC News reported:

    Trump said on Truth Social … that Microsoft should ‘immediately terminate’ its president of global affairs, Lisa Monaco. Monaco previously held a number of top government national security roles, including serving as deputy attorney general for the duration of the Biden administration. Monaco began working for Microsoft in July, according to a LinkedIn post.

    As part of a long and rambling online tantrum, the president condemned Monaco as “corrupt” and “deranged,” before complaining that she will have “access to Highly Sensitive Information” in her current role.

    Trump added, “Monaco’s having that kind of access is unacceptable, and cannot be allowed to stand. She is a menace to U.S. National Security, especially given the major contracts that Microsoft has with the United States Government. Because of Monaco’s many wrongful acts, the U.S. Government recently stripped her of all Security Clearances, took away all of her access to National Security Intelligence, and banned her from all Federal Properties. It is my opinion that Microsoft should immediately terminate the employment of Lisa Monaco.”

    There are a handful of elements to this that are worth keeping in mind, starting with the fact that that there’s simply no reason to take any of Trump’s hysterics related to Monaco seriously.

    What’s more, this an important reflection of the president’s authoritarian vision: He’s not just the president of the United States, he also sees himself as America’s CEO, which he apparently believes affords him great influence over the nation’s private sector. […] [I snipped other examples of Trump pressuring companies to fire people he doesn’t like.]

    One sentence in the Republican’s online rant particularly stood out for me: “She is a menace to U.S. National Security, especially given the major contracts that Microsoft has with the United States Government.”

    Putting aside that Trump tried to smear Monaco without cause, his reference to Microsoft’s government contracts opens a radical and dangerous door: Would the president use his office to steer contracts away from the tech giant unless and until it agreed to fire someone he doesn’t like for political reasons? Given his track record, is such a possibility that hard to believe?

  14. says

    Trump’s Venezuela Saber-Rattling Revives Bad Old Days of U.S. Policy in Latin America

    New Jingoism Same as the Old Jingoism

    […] Semantic games are already being played to tout the operation not as regime change but as a “counternarcotics operation.”

    “The U.S. is engaged in a counterdrug-cartel operation, and any claim that we are coordinating with anyone on anything other than this targeted effort is completely false,” a State Department spokesperson told the NYT.

    Not How the Chain of Command Is Supposed to Work
    White House deputy chief Stephen Miller has taken a leading role in the directing the unlawful U.S. attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats off Venezuela, The Guardian reports.

    The strikes have been orchestrated through the White House homeland security council. which Miller leads, according to the report.

    Are Military Lawyers Being Sidelined?
    Former Army JAG Dan Maurer, now a law professor, writes that the unprecedented U.S. attacks on alleged drug-running boats “raise serious questions about the availability and effectiveness of government lawyers throughout the chain of command who would have—or should have—raised red flags before this operation commenced.”

  15. says

    GAO says Trump’s moves to withhold FEMA grants are illegal

    The Trump administration violated the law when it withheld three types of grants managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) said Monday.

    The GAO said FEMA’s moves to withhold the grants violated the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), which spells out the rules under which a presidential administration can seek to delay or cancel funding that’s enacted by Congress.

    Monday’s report specifically knocked FEMA’s actions related to the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, the Shelter and Services Program and the Next Generation Warning System Grant Program.

    These programs provide funds that support shelter and food for homeless people, offset costs for organizations that provide services for migrants and support improvements in emergency alert systems, respectively.

    “Because FEMA has deobligated and delayed the obligation or expenditure of funds without providing any justification or indicating a plan to implement these programs and move forward with the obligation and expenditure of funds, the withdrawals, holds, and reviews discussed below cannot be considered programmatic delays,” the report said. […]

  16. says

    Trump Dementia Speech to Generals-Admirals

    I will keep this short but I’ve been watching Trump’s speech to the unprecedented meeting of all generals and admirals at the Pentagon.

    It is a rambling shitstorm of dementia. Long untethered word salad about the quality of the paper used for letters appointing officers, Iranian ‘air chutes’ he bombed, building battleships again because they are cheaper than missles, how he walks down stairs slowly to avoid falling because it only takes one fall for bad things to happen, and pure incoherent rambling. If he had a prepared speech it is long gone, just like his mind. Same as his father. This is not politics. He needs to be institutionalized […]

    UPDATE: Now he’s saying the military will be involved in fighting the ‘domestic’ ‘enemy within’ and he will use the military to ‘keep peace’ in cities where the radical left like George Soros has taken over. That he will never hesitate to fight ‘the plague’ that is damaging the country ‘from within.’ This is going to be very, very bad.

    Both CNN and MSNBC cut away and are either ignoring this shitstorm of dementia or sane-washing it. From CSPAN it looks like the speech is over. This country is being run by a mentally ill person, with the Supreme Court crowning him a king. We need to keep fighting and never give up, but so long as Trump is President this country is F’d.

    UPDATE: At least the media is focusing on Trump saying he told Hegseth “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

  17. says

    A followup of sorts to comment 16.

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday gave a disgraceful speech to the military’s top brass in which he said the military should ditch its code of ethics, weaken investigations in war crimes, and eliminate anything and everything related to diversity—and told anyone who didn’t like it to resign.

    Hegseth said the military will no longer abide by a code of ethics that aims to reduce violence and casualties.

    “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” Hegseth said, adding that the military will “kill people and break things for a living.”

    He promised to neuter inspectors general who probe allegations of misconduct, which is likely to lead to more war crimes.

    “We are overhauling an inspector general process … that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues, and poor performers in the driver’s seat,” Hegseth said. “We are doing the same with the equal-opportunity and military equal-opportunity policies. … No more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complainants … no more walking on eggshells.” [video]

    In […] Trump’s first term, Hegseth successfully convinced Trump to pardon soldiers accused or convicted of war crimes. Now he will seemingly change the rules so people who commit war crimes are never punished in the first place.

    During his speech, Hegseth said he will allow basic-training drill sergeants to beat up recruits, which is sure to cause fewer soldiers to come forward when they’ve been sexually assaulted or abused by people supposedly on their side.

    Hegseth also said he will end what he called the “toxic ideological garbage” in the military, saying, “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, we are done with that shit.”

    The speech likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The unqualified ex-host of a Fox News weekend program forced hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals stationed all over the world to fly in on a moment’s notice so he could deliver his vile speech.

    Ultimately, Hegseth said that if the military leaders he forced to sit through his despicable speech didn’t like what he had to say, they should resign.

    Of course, not content with letting his defense secretary get all of the spotlight, Trump addressed the military brass himself, telling them that they should worship at his feet and that if they don’t like it, they will be fired.

    “If you want to applaud, you applaud,” Trump said, after saying that the room was too “silent” when he walked in. “And If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”

    Before speaking to the military leaders, Trump defended the cost of the idiotic gathering.

    “There’s a little expense to that,” Trump said of getting all these generals and admirals in the same room. “But this was the one time we had to do a great spiritizing. It’s going to be great.”

    Democrats slammed Trump and Hegseth’s shameful display, calling it a waste of money.

    “He billed the taxpayers millions to fly every general to Washington to hear this weirdo drivel,” Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote in a post on X.

    Link

  18. StevoR says

    FWIW just seen on France24 news via SBS Worldwatch c35 that Trump has apparently said Hamas has 3 or 4 days to agree to his peace proposal..

  19. StevoR says

    @ ^ See :

    US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he was giving Hamas “three or four days” to respond to his Gaza ceasefire plan, under which the Palestinian militants must fully disarm and would be excluded from future government. A Palestinian source close to Hamas earlier said the group was reviewing Trump’s 20-point proposal, warning that deliberations could take days. Follow our liveblog for the latest developments.

    Source : https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250930-live-netanyahu-says-israeli-army-will-remain-in-most-of-gaza-war-trump-plan

  20. KG says

    Lynna, OM@17 quoting Daily Kos,

    Trump and Hegseth are taking another leaf out of the Nazi playbook: one of Hitler’s first concerns was to subordinate the military chiefs to Nazi ideology and to himself personally.

  21. StevoR says

    Gather the multiship (30 -50 ish?) Sumud flotilla is supposed / scheduled / on track* to to arrive in Gaza in next day or so ~ish too with a few naval vessels from , memory serving Italy, Spain & Turkiye accompanying it – unsure how the current Trump peace plan might affect that and Isreal’s treatement of them.. Guess we’re about to find out shortly..

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Sumud_Flotilla

    .* Are there “tracks” in the sea?

  22. birgerjohansson says

    As mentioned above, Trump has given a long and rambling speech to the assembled top brass. For their sanity’s sake, I hope he has finished by now.

    Silver lining: both Hegseth and Trump have by now proven themselves utterly unworthy of command to the listeners.

    Trying to recruit them for internal brownshirt duty will not be welcome, Trump & Hegseth will have to rely of the swollen ranks of inadequately trained ICE paramilitaries for that.

  23. JM says

    @17 Lynna, OM:

    “If you want to applaud, you applaud,” Trump said, after saying that the room was too “silent” when he walked in. “And If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”

    It should be noted that sitting silently wasn’t snubbing Hegseth and Trump, that is normal procedure for senior officers. None of the forced displays of enthusiasm you see with enlisted men.
    Apparently nobody told Trump that. None of them clapped after Trump asked them to either. I suspect this event hammered home to the military that the secretary of defense and president are nuts.
    The whole thing was utterly insane, a low grade campaign publicity event with the entire military command.

  24. StevoR says

    DW news just had a pretty intresting interview with an AJ (?) “Hegmeyer” (spelling / name*?) on Trump’s latest Gaza plan that I just saw on TV (SBS Worldwatch c35) but cannot yet find on their website or yt channel.

    .* Or suchlike? Maybe? Dependent on my poor hearing, didn’t really quite catch.. Typing from ear and memory both v fallible. Hopefully will appear somewhere soon~ish?

  25. says

    JM @23, thanks for that analysis. Good explanation.

    In other news, but related to the military: Republican governor asks the Pentagon to deploy National Guard troops to Louisiana

    “Some cities in the Pelican State are poised to join the growing list of areas where National Guard troops will be deployed to public streets.”

    Related video, hosted by Rachel Maddow, is available at the link.

    In recent months, Americans have already seen National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., at Donald Trump’s direction. Soon, we’ll also see deployments in Memphis and — if the president has his way — in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago.

    Evidently, some cities in Louisiana are joining the growing club. The New York Times reported:

    Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana has asked the Trump administration to deploy as many as 1,000 National Guard troops in his state, embracing the president’s push to use troops to fight crime. In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday, the Republican governor asked for the troops from Louisiana to help with ‘ongoing public safety concerns regarding high crime rates.’

    The written appeal roughly coincided with the GOP governor’s appearance on Fox News, where Landry used the White House-approved phrasing “Department of War” (instead of Department of Defense), adding that he wants to see troops deployed “here in Louisiana into our cities like New Orleans.”

    The governor neglected to mention some good news that would negate his political gambit: The Associated Press reported that New Orleans is seeing “a particularly steep drop in 2025 that has put it on pace to have its lowest number of killings in more than five decades.”

    What’s more, Landry, a former Republican member of Congress, said in his Pentagon request that his plan is to build on “the proven success” of deployments to Memphis, which seems like an odd thing to say since there haven’t been any troop operations in the Tennessee city yet.

    Complicating matters still more, governors don’t need the Trump administration’s approval to deploy Guard troops. Landry, by virtue of his job description, is currently the commander in chief of the Louisiana National Guard, which means he already has the authority to mobilize his own Guard troops, at his discretion, without Hegseth’s or Donald Trump’s intervention.

    Indeed, New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, deployed her state’s Guard troops to Albuquerque earlier this year — though not in a way the White House prefers — and the efforts appear to have made a significant difference locally.

    In Louisiana, however, the Republican governor is looking to partner with the administration on a model in which troops would be federally funded but controlled by Landry over the next 12 months. The Pentagon seems likely to approve the request.

  26. says

    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show

    Saudis greenlight ‘Trump Plaza’ project while awaiting approval of massive media deal with Jared
    Video is 5:00 minutes, and discusses a $50 Billion [!] deal.

    Feds freak out over Trump-Epstein statue: ‘Pushback drives them crazy’
    Video is 2:45 minutes. There was more to this story than I thought.

    Candidate rips into Trump admin over release of private data to Republican opponent
    Video is 9:44 minutes.