Great moments in ‘Gotcha!’ questioning

Republicans are furious with special prosecutor Jack Smith over his investigations of Trump after he said that he had found “proof beyond reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump had “engaged in serious crimes against our nation.” Trump’s toadies have tried to smear him as a political hack and they brought him before a senate committee to grill him.

Senator Eric Schmitt from Missouri carefully laid what he thought was a trap for Smith, to suggest that he had secretly met Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis who had been doing a separate investigation, thus suggesting collusion between them. Schmitt asked Smith whether he had been in Atlanta in February 2024 and Smith, looking bewildered, said that he could not recall doing so and that he had not been in Atlanta at that time unless he had been in transit at the airport.

Schmitt then smugly produced a poster containing text messages among Smith’s staff about seat numbers for the NBA game between the Atlanta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors in February 2024. He quickly put the poster down and declined Smith’s request to take a closer look at it. He then warned Smith that he may be committing perjury and went further, calling him a ‘villain’ and a ‘dirtbag’

Unfortunately for Schmitt, he had got his facts wrong. Smith said that he recalled attending a women’s college basketball game between the Iowa Hawkeyes and the Maryland Gophers at that time but that was in Maryland. So basically Schmitt had got confused by the similarity of ‘Hawkeyes’ to ‘Hawks’ and rushed to create a gotcha moment that blew up in his face.

Watch.

When questioned later about his humiliating blunder, Schmitt tried to bluff his way out, as is par for these dirtbag Trump fanboys.

China is the big winner in the US-Israel war against Iran

The president of China Xi Jinping came on a state visit to the US that provided little in terms of concrete measures but Trump was effusive in his efforts to show Xi how much he admired him, so much so that one must think that Xi was embarrassed. Being praised may please someone but most people become uncomfortable when someone goes overboard and goes on about how wonderful they are. They are not like Trump who likes nothing more than to have people around them like Natalie Harp who gush over how wonderful he is and he probably thinks that others like it too.

Xi in turn responded with what reads like a Yelp review.

Trump almost visibly glowed with delight when Xi praised the quality of service and attention to detail of his White House visit. “Everything is done to the highest order of perfection, and there is thought in every little detail,” the Chinese president said through a translator. “And it’s greatly appreciated.”

You could describe that as the meaningless courtesies of routine statecraft, but it also suggested a high-flying hotel guest offering his compliments to the concierge: The eggs this morning were entirely delicious. And the way your people turn down the sheets at night: exquisite!
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In large part, the absolute nothingness of this summit reflects the fact that China is already winning across the board and Xi needed nothing from Trump beyond the legitimation provided by a diplotainment spectacle “to the highest order of perfection.” As China scholars Nicholas Bequelin and Yaqiu Wang write in a Foreign Policy analysis published before the summit, over the first 19 months of Trump’s second term, the geopolitical “balance of power has shifted in Beijing’s favor”.
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Xi has no need to strike an overtly aggressive posture and can afford to cosplay friendship with Trump because “the West,” or at least its greatest military and economic power, is doing a terrific job of declining all on its own. To borrow the nostrum attributed to Napoleon, the Chinese president is smart enough not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake. 

Trump came into power hyperbolically claiming that the US was in a terrible state and that he would restore America’s greatness. But  Andrew O’Hehir writes that Xi must be feeling good about how Trump’s policies and actions are aiding China’s effort to become the dominant power.
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Monday morning comedy

I thought that I would start the week with some laughs before the usual dreary news kicks in.

The Onion News Network reports on a minimum wage bill that Congress might actually pass.

Trump’s BFF Natalie Harp seems to have become a news mainstay.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel having his monologue interrupted by her (played by Kimmel’s wife).

And here is SNL’s cold open that also features Trump’s curious attempt to ingratiate himself with Zohran Mamdani.

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Why DoorDash spent so much to defeat Mamdani

The food delivery company DoorDash spent heavily in the past New York City mayoral campaign in an effort to defeat the eventual winner Zohran Mamdani and put into office Andrew Cuomo. Companies like DoorDash and Uber use drivers that they treat as independent contractors so that they are hard to unionize and can be exploited in many ways. Local governments can put in place regulations that can prevent such abuses and Mamdani had promised to enforce those rules.

Through that election cycle, DoorDash spent around $1.4 million against Mamdani and in favor of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The company was one of the top donors to the biggest outside spender in the election, a virulently anti-Mamdani super PAC called Fix the City. 
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DoorDash contributed $1 million to Fix the City, a super PAC that spent $31 million in the mayoral election, accounting for close to half of the total outside spending in the race, largely funded by big corporations and billionaires. DoorDash made the payment in May 2025, at a time Mamdani’s campaign was gaining significant momentum ahead of the mayoral primaries in June.

Fix the City ran a barrage of ads, phone calls, text messages, and other forms of political communication seeking to prevent a Mamdani victory and portraying him as a politician with “radically dangerous ideas” and “a risk New York can’t afford.”
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The US as a terrorist state

What is terrorism? It turns out that there is no universally agreed upon definition.

There is no legal or scientific consensus on the definition of terrorism. Various legal systems and government agencies use different definitions of terrorism, and governments have been reluctant to formulate an agreed-upon legally binding definition.
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The United Nations General Assembly condemned terrorist acts by using the following political description of terrorism in December 1994 (GA Res. 49/60):

Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.

While there is no agreed upon definition, the terms is broadly understood to be along the lines of “the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.”

It should not be surprising that there is no agreed upon definition. Governments, including (and especially the US and Israel) have opposed creating a definition because they know that almost any definition would implicate them as terrorist states. By not having a clear definition, the word then becomes a pejorative to be used as a term of propaganda against one’s enemies while exempting oneself. If pressed, they will retreat to ‘intent’, that it is the motivation for the actions that matters. This is conveniently self-serving since one can always ascribe benign motives to ones own actions (even if the outcome was appalling) and malignant ones to one’s enemies.

Kyle Kulinski uses the right wing condemnation of some of Hasan Piker’s comments about US atrocities to argue that by any reasonable reasonable definition, especially the sheer numbers of innocent people killed by the actions of the US all over the world over a long period of time, it becomes clear that the US is the biggest perpetrator of terrorism in the world and he says that American people should face up to this brutal reality.
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What’s with the furries obsession?

I have paid just a passing interest to the issue of ‘furries’, the people who role-play by dressing up as anthropomorphic animals. People have all kinds of hobbies and interests and this seems to be just another one, since it seems to be like people who dress up as their favorite characters from films and TV and get together with like-minded people. But the transphobes among us see them as dangerous allies of the transgender community, trying to create gender confusion.

It is astonishing that Tommy Tuberville, a current member of the US senate who is running the next governor of Alabama, seems to be obsessed with furries, and gave a nearly 20-minutes speech on the senate floor warning about the dangers of furries and the transgender community. You have to listen to the speech to realize how insane these ideas are.

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The danger of roller coasters

When I was a child, I went on roller coasters in the UK and experienced the thrill of going around curves at high speeds and with sudden drops. But as I grew up, such stomach-turning motion ceased to have any appeal and I have long since stopped going on them. But some people clearly enjoy the experience and seek ever more thrilling rides and owners of amusement parks were very willing to indulge them and began to compete by offering faster, higher runs and more tight and rapid turns.

The thrill that riders experience comes from the rapid changes in velocity, that results in the so-called g-forces they experience when their velocity undergoes changes in magnitude or direction over a short time interval. In the latter case, the greater the speed and the smaller the circle in which they turn, the higher the g-value. But sudden changes in the acceleration (like a sudden drop to almost free-fall) can also produce the kind of disorienting effects that riders seem to enjoy
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John Oliver on the evil UnitedHealth Group

Luigi Mangione is scheduled to be sentenced on December 18, 2026. He became something of a folk hero after killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company widely reviled for its practice of putting up block after block to prevent having to pay for the health care of its subscribers even when they faced life-threatening situations and even died because of the denials.

In his usual thorough way, John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight dissects the odious practices of UnitedHealthcare and the even worse practices of its lesser-known but even bigger parent company UnitedHealth Group which, it turns out, is the third biggest corporation in the US. He looks at how it got so profitable by adopting practices that have infuriated both patients and doctors alike.

The obscene profits and behavior of these health insurance companies have to end and we have to create a single payer system that puts them out of business. As Oliver says, “at best they are pointless time wasting middlemen and at worst algorithmically driven, ruthless arbiters of who lives and who dies.”

The US is winning battles and losing wars

Of the many lessons that we can learn from the sudden advances by the group Ansar Allah (aka Houthis) in Yemen, the main one is that the US, although it has the raw power to bludgeon its enemies and win tactical victories by bombing campaigns, seems to be consistently outmaneuvered by its enemies when to comes to strategic thinking. Air power is a blunt weapon, incapable of securing and holding territory and yet the US continues to think it can deliver more than it can.

The classic example was in Vietnam. The US poured in massive amounts of troops and aerial firepower that enabled them to seize (or at least destroy) any village or hamlet that they chose, not to mention waging massive ecological warfare and committing war crimes on a massive scale. And yet, general Võ Nguyên Giáp, the legendary wily leader of the North Vietnamese army, was able to stymie their enemies, such as with the French spectacularly in the battle of Dien Bien Phu, that forced them to give up and leave.

While the French and the US had superiority in terms of weaponry and air power, the Vietnamese had the advantage of fighting on their home terrain. Furthermore, this was an existential fight for them, they were fighting for something they believed in, and they were never going to give up easily, while the foreign invaders were dilettantes with little knowledge of who they were fighting and why they were there in the first place. That pattern is being repeated with Iran and now Yemen.

The so-called defense umbrella strategy where the US provided bases to the Gulf states to provide security in exchange for uninterrupted supplies of oil from them has fallen apart. As the recent photographic evidence of the wreckage of planes and buildings at some of those bases show, rather than US bases providing shields, those countries have instead been made into targets that the US cannot defend, which must make those countries wonder what benefits they provide. And we have not even seen the damage to the major base in Bahrain where even the acting secretary of the navy Hung Cao said of Iran that “They blew the hell out of Bahrain”, an admission that the Iranians were quick to echo.
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The instinct to buy and hold on to stuff

There seem to be two iron rules of American consumerism.

The first one is that people love to buy stuff even if the don’t really need the items. This habit has become hugely magnified by companies making it extremely easy to buy stuff on impulse. You see something online that interests you? Just one click and it appears at your door the next day. The second one is that people hate to get rid of stuff that they do not use and perhaps should never have bought in the first place.

I know people who have ever increasing amounts of stuff even as their need for it decreases. They buy things because they met a specialized need, like some tool or a kitchen gadget that is designed for a specific task, and now lies unused They hang on to them for sentimental reasons or with the idea that at at some point they may need it again, however unlikely that is.

I tend to be of the opposite frame of mind. I am an anti-consumer and try not to buy anything, however small and cheap, unless I absolutely need it and nothing else can substitute for it or it serves multiple useful purposes.Recently I was in the supermarket in the kitchen items aisle that has lots of gadgets. I make omelets and recipes for that and other things often call for the use of a whisk. I picked one up to buy but after a few moments decided that a fork would be an adequate substitute and put it back. Then the other day, I saw a video of a neat little gadget. You put a raw egg in it, close it, and then open it and the two halves of the egg separate cleanly, with no bits of shell or a broken yolk. But did I really need it? I usually crack an egg on a sharp edge of a skillet or a bowl and most of the time it separates just fine but occasionally there will be bits of shell or the yolk breaks. But I figured that the occasional mishap did not warrant getting such a specialized gadget. But clearly there is a market for such items. Because of my attitude, although my apartment complex provides additional storage space, I have not used it at all.
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