Haven’t you heard? DJT has outlawed bad weather. No more blizzards. No more hurricanes. No more tornadoes. No more atmospheric rivers. They make him look bad. Similar to the way he has outlawed diseases and pandemics.
“C.I.A. Conducted Drone Strike on Port in Venezuela”
“The attack last week, on a dock purportedly used for shipping narcotics, did not kill anyone, people briefed on the operation said. But it was the first known U.S. operation inside Venezuela.”
The C.I.A. conducted a drone strike on a port facility in Venezuela last week, according to people briefed on the operation, a development that suggests an aggressive new phase of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the Maduro government has begun.
The strike was on a dock where U.S. officials believe Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, was storing narcotics and potentially preparing to move the drugs onto boats, the people said.
No one was on the dock at the time, and no one was killed, they said. But the strike is the first known American operation inside Venezuela.
The details of the strike, which were reported earlier by CNN, fleshed out an attack that President Trump had already discussed openly, despite the secrecy that typically surrounds C.I.A. operations.
[…] The New York Times reported earlier this year that Mr. Trump had authorized C.I.A. operations in Venezuela and ordered them to plan for a variety of potential missions.
The C.I.A. regularly conducted drone strikes against terrorist targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere during the Obama administration. But the agency is not known to have conducted strikes recently, leaving operations to the U.S. military.
It is not clear if the drone used in the mission was owned by the C.I.A. or borrowed from the U.S. military. Military officials declined to comment on Monday. The Pentagon has stationed several MQ-9 Reaper drones, which carry Hellfire missiles, at bases in Puerto Rico as part of the pressure campaign.
Russia claimed that Ukraine targeted Putin’s private home with a drone attack. Ukraine strenuously denied it. Trump accepted Putin’s story as true anyway.
Related video at the link.
Diplomatic efforts to resolve Russia’s war in Ukraine were made even complex this week when Vladimir Putin alleged that his rural home had been targeted by a failed Ukrainian drone attack. Russia offered no evidence to substantiate the claims, and as The New York Times reported, Ukraine strenuously denied that such an operation took place:
Ukraine immediately denied any such attack, accusing the Kremlin of inventing a pretext to undermine the peace talks being orchestrated by the Trump administration. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who met with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Sunday to discuss a possible deal, called the Russian allegation a ‘complete fabrication.’
[…] Donald Trump, however, apparently accepted Putin’s claims at face value.
“I learned about it from President Putin today,” the American president told reporters. “I was very angry about it.”
Asked whether Putin’s claims had been verified by evidence collected by U.S. intelligence agencies, Trump initially replied: “Well, we’ll find out.”
Or put another way, the American president became “very angry” about claims, despite not knowing whether they were true or not.
In case that weren’t quite enough, moments later Trump told the reporter who asked the question, “I mean, you’re saying maybe the attack didn’t take place. It’s possible, too, I guess, but President Putin told me this morning it did.” [social media post, with video]
The comments reflected a simple truth that too often goes unmentioned: Trump simply trusts Putin. Trump has never explained why, but the Russian leader has the American president’s ear, and Trump appears eager to accept Putin’s claims at face value — despite everything he really ought to know about the former KGB agent’s record and obvious lack of credibility.
Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who has consistently been critical of the White House’s weakness toward Moscow, wrote via social media, “President Trump and his team should get the facts first before assuming blame. Putin is a well-known boldface liar.”
The fact that Trump will likely ignore the retiring congressman’s good advice speaks volumes.
“As electricity costs climb, Trump could try to avoid blame for the problem. He prefers to push an alternate reality in which the problem doesn’t exist.”
Related video at the link.
[…] “Electricity is down. It’s way down,” Trump said. “You know, when the gasoline goes down and when the oil and oil and gas go down, the electricity comes down naturally. But it’s all coming down. It’s all coming down. It’s coming beautifully.” [Lies]
American consumers would surely be delighted if their president were telling the truth, but he’s not.
As the editorial board of The New York Times recently explained, “Electricity prices are almost 10 percent higher than they were a year earlier, according to the most recent numbers.” [!]
[…] the Times’ editors added that the Republican administration’s energy policies “are not helping — and will soon make matters worse.”
A new report in The Wall Street Journal pointed in the same direction.
Most Americans are paying more for electricity — and need to prepare their wallets for further pain ahead.
Data centers are getting much of the blame lately for rising power costs, but they aren’t the only catalyst and don’t always cause increases. The reasons our bills are rising are complex and varied. Hurricanes, wildfires, state renewable-energy plans and the replacement of aging or damaged grid equipment are all playing a role.
[…] “We intend to slash prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months,” Trump said in August 2024. He went on to claim, “We’re looking to cut them in half, and we think we’ll be able to do better. … You will never have had energy so low as you will under a certain gentleman known as Donald J. Trump. Have you heard of him? So we think your energy bills will be down by 50% to 70%. How good would that be?”
[…] the president has failed spectacularly to deliver on his promise.
The curious thing about these developments is that Trump could plausibly explain why rising electricity prices are not entirely his fault. But instead of making the case to the public on why he doesn’t bear full responsibility for the problem, the president has decided to manufacture an alternate reality in which the problem doesn’t exist, and electricity costs are “way down.”
That the president is the nation’s most prolific liar is nothing new, but I continue to believe there’s a qualitative difference between regular ol’ lying and self-defeating lying. Often, when Trump peddles nonsense, the American mainstream isn’t immediately sure what to believe, and it falls to media fact-checkers to offer the public guidance on what’s true and what’s not.
But when the president tells Americans that electricity prices are “coming down … beautifully,” no one needs a fact-checker; they just need a bill from their local power company.
“Tenet Media’s Lauren Chen is back—even though the illegal-influence and money-laundering investigation remains open.”
[…] Lauren Chen left the United States in July in disgrace. Her Tenet Media YouTube channel, which positioned itself as a sort of MAGA supergroup bringing together such popular commentators as Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin, had been exposed in 2024 by the FBI as a Russian media front illicitly taking money from pro-Putin propaganda outlet RT.
[…] In the wake of the indictment, Chen lost her work visa and was forced to leave the country. She also vanished from social media. It seemed unlikely she would return to the United States anytime soon.
But this holiday season, Chen and her husband were back in Nashville, where she lived while running Tenet. She broke the news herself, by announcing on Instagram and X on Christmas Day that she could now return to the United States, and specifically thanking the State Department’s Joe Rittenhouse, a senior adviser on consular affairs and former Trump presidential campaign worker, for his help.
[…] Chen also thanked Customs and Border Patrol, the FBI, and “the administration” broadly.
[…] Rittenhouse does appear to be a fan of right-wing media. In August, he posted a picture with his feet up on a desk in what appeared to be a government office building, watching a video from right-wing British YouTuber “Sargon of Akkad.”
[…] the administration has not shied away from throwing bones to right wing media figures—prioritizing them at White House functions and elevating them at the briefings. As for Russian interests, the president has long been outwardly comfortable associating with them.
[…] According to court records, the federal case against Tenet’s funders is still open. But with the Russian operators who allegedly facilitated the money-laundering scheme still at large, the investigation hasn’t gone anywhere in the year since the indictments were filed.
The right-wing commentators who posted on Tenet have maintained their innocence about the nature of the operation, with Johnson, Rubin, and Pool all claiming that they were “victims” of Chen’s company—duped, as it were, by the Russian government into taking tens of thousands of dollars for making a single YouTube video.
[…] The one person who did face some fallout was Chen, whose visa situation with the American government was dire. This past September, she complained that the Biden administration had “nuked my visa” after Tenet’s funding was exposed. […]
The Trump administration’s intervention on Chen’s behalf comes as it has moved to dramatically restrict visa rules more broadly—even denying visas to activists opposed to disinformation. […]
Imagine a nation, a major world power, where people are being persecuted, erased, snatched off the street and dumped in faraway countries to which they have no connection, because the nation is run by bigoted nationalists who are led by a dementia-addled ball of shrieking, hot rage. Where open corruption flourishes at the highest levels of a government stocked soup to nuts with some of the most feral, vicious, incompetent dipwads that nation has ever produced
And yet you are stuck pretending those are the good guys, because the bad guys have spent almost four years bombing your nation to smithereens while displacing and murdering hundreds of thousands of your citizens, and you need the dipwads’ help to get them to stop.
Such is the plight of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president came to Florida this weekend, to Donald Trump’s bargain-basement Xanadu that he thinks is on par with the greatest buildings ever created by Western civilization, to present a 20-point peace plan for ending Russia’s invasion of his country. This was a counter to the 28-point plan that the US floated a few weeks ago that read as if it had been dictated by Vladimir Putin himself. Which it probably was.
Remember back in August, when Trump flew to Alaska to meet Putin, going so far as to have a red carpet rolled out when Putin deplaned so that his fancy-soled shoes would not have to suffer the indignity of touching an airport tarmac? The two leaders met on that carpet and shook hands while grinning broadly, Trump because there is nothing he admires more than a ruthless dictator he can suck up to, Putin because Donald Trump is such a sucker.
There was none of that for Zelenskyy. There was not a single American official waiting on the tarmac to greet him, just Ukraine’s ambassador and some other personnel. Trump could not be bothered, even though the Miami airport is slightly closer to Mar-a-Lago than Alaska. This struck us as quite the diplomatic snub, one that sent a message that very clearly told the Ukrainians who America finds important and worth listening to here. […]
“How Social Security has gotten worse under Trump”
“Customer service deteriorated by key measures as the agency enacted sweeping cuts in Trump’s second term, internal data and interviews show.”
The Social Security Administration — the sprawling federal agency that delivers retirement, disability and survivor benefits to 74 million Americans — began the second Trump administration with a hostile takeover.
It ends the year in turmoil. A diminished workforce has struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices — record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.
Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit and hasty policy changes and reassignments left inexperienced staff to handle the aftermath.
Exaggerated claims of fraud, for example, have led to new roadblocks for elderly beneficiaries, disabled people and legal immigrants, who are now required to complete some transactions in person or online rather than by phone. Even so, the number of calls to the agency for the year hit 93 million as of late September — a six-year high, data shows.
The troubled disability benefits system is also deteriorating after some improvement, with 66 percent of disability appointments scheduled within 28 days as of December — down from nearly 90 percent earlier in the year, data shows. [Graph]
[…] Commissioner Frank Bisignano has authorized millions of dollars in overtime pay to employees in a race to clear the bottlenecks, which worsened dramatically after nearly 7,000 employees — 12 percent of the workforce — were squeezed out early in the year. The agency said it has made improvements: It reduced the processing center backlog by 1 million cases this fall, cut pending disability claims by a third and kept the website live 24/7 after a series of outages earlier this year.
The current crisis follows years of disinvestment by Congress […]
This account of the crisis at Social Security is based on internal documents and interviews with 41 current and former employees, advocates and customers, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about their concerns.
[…] The table was set in February by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which installed a loyal, mid-level data analyst with no management experience to lead the $15.4 billion agency.
[…] Regional offices abruptly disappeared in a rushed reorganization. New policies to fight fraud were rolled out only to be canceled or changed, prompting confused customers to jam the phones and the website, which crashed repeatedly. Daily operations in some respects became an endless game of whack-a-mole as employees were pulled from one department to another.
Along the way, Social Security also became ground zero in the administration’s quest to gather Americans’ personal data — largely in service of its mass deportation campaign. […]
For the convenience of readers, here are a few links back to the previous set of almost 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/10/01/infinite-thread-xxxvii/comment-page-7/#comment-2288074
Did the president boast about a foreign strike that didn’t happen, or did he disclose a strike he wasn’t supposed to talk about? Now we know the answer.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/10/01/infinite-thread-xxxvii/comment-page-7/#comment-2288044
Nicholas Grossman: “The US wasn’t attacked by Venezuela, someone based in Venezuela, or anyone else. There’s no self-defense argument, and the US didn’t even try for UNSC authorization.”
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/10/01/infinite-thread-xxxvii/comment-page-7/#comment-2288037
Latest government inflation, GDP figures are worthless, and will be for months
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/10/01/infinite-thread-xxxvii/comment-page-7/#comment-2287999
US offered Ukraine 15 years of security guarantees, Zelenskyy says
Haven’t you heard? DJT has outlawed bad weather. No more blizzards. No more hurricanes. No more tornadoes. No more atmospheric rivers. They make him look bad. Similar to the way he has outlawed diseases and pandemics.
New York Times link
“C.I.A. Conducted Drone Strike on Port in Venezuela”
“The attack last week, on a dock purportedly used for shipping narcotics, did not kill anyone, people briefed on the operation said. But it was the first known U.S. operation inside Venezuela.”
Trump wastes little time embracing Putin’s latest dubious claim
Russia claimed that Ukraine targeted Putin’s private home with a drone attack. Ukraine strenuously denied it. Trump accepted Putin’s story as true anyway.
Related video at the link.
The more Trump focuses on electricity prices, the more rising costs matter
“As electricity costs climb, Trump could try to avoid blame for the problem. He prefers to push an alternate reality in which the problem doesn’t exist.”
Related video at the link.
Trump Admin Scores Visa for Founder of Russian Propaganda Outlet
“Tenet Media’s Lauren Chen is back—even though the illegal-influence and money-laundering investigation remains open.”
https://www.wonkette.com/p/ukraine-russia-war-still-going-despite
Washington Post link
“How Social Security has gotten worse under Trump”
“Customer service deteriorated by key measures as the agency enacted sweeping cuts in Trump’s second term, internal data and interviews show.”
Much more at the link.