How stupid are Republicans?

That question, rhetorical of course, is prompted by the story about the leaked texts by members of the group known as Young Republicans that reveal them saying the most awful things, a story that keeps gaining steam.

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

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Can you tell on sight if someone is sleazy?

The book Nobody’s Girl: Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre has just been released.

She was the young woman who died by suicide in April of this year at the age of 41. Her memoir reveals a horrific life of abuse and exploitation that continued right up to the end. After being sexually abused as a child, starting as a teenager she was sexually abused and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, passed around to their wealthy and influential friends, including the disgusting Price Andrew, like she was some kind of plaything with whom they could do as they liked. Epstein was a collector of famous people who, having no particular claim to distinction, used his considerable money (the origins of which remain obscure to this day) to buy the friendship of people whom he considered clever, famous , and influential, all this while having a coterie of attractive young single women hanging around his homes.

What is astonishing is that all these people claimed to not have sensed that there was anything amiss. But Emma Brockes, in a review of the book finds these claims of ignorance hard to believe.
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Massive protests against Trump

Yesterday saw massive protests against the Trump regime and its increasingly fascistic nature. Millions took part in over 2,700 locations in the US. This was a follow up to the June event that drew between two million and five million people across more than 2,000 locations.

In Chicago, at Grant Park’s Butler Field, at least 10,000 people assembled, many with signs opposing federal immigration agents or mocking Trump. TV stations with feeds from protests warned viewers they could not be responsible for the language used in the signage.

Some of them said “Hands Off Chicago”, a rallying cry that began when the president first announced his intent to send the national guard into the city. Others read “Resist Fascism”, but many others used language unsuitable for broadcast.

The crowd erupted in chants of “Fuck Donald Trump” when Illinois representative Jonathan Jackson took the stage.

More than 200,000 Washington DC-area residents rallied near the US Capitol. In many cities, protesters wore inflatable animal costumes – a Dada-esque theme created during immigration enforcement protests in Portland, Oregon, to counter the administration’s narrative of a city under the grip of lawlessness and chaos.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, costumed characters included unicorns, chickens and frogs. “It’s about the absurdity of it all,” resident Amy Adler told the Santa Fe New Mexican while wearing a lobster suit she described as an ode to Portland.

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China raises the stakes

Relations between China and the US have been tense ever since Trump started his mercurial behavior with tariffs, raising and lowering and raising them again so frequently that I gave up trying to keep track. Trade relations between the US and the rest of the world seem more and more like a poker game in which the US starts out with a huge pile of chips and keeps raising the stakes, forcing out the smaller players, the countries that cannot afford to go toe-to-toe with the economic giant, so that they fold. The one exception is China which does have the resources to stay in the game. Up until now, they seem to have been content to be in a reactive mode, matching the US as it raises the ante.

But in a surprising development, China took the lead in raising the stakes, imposing new measures that would enable them to restrict the export of rare earth materials that are crucial for electronics.

China’s Ministry of Commerce on Thursday unveiled its most expansive rare earth export controls to date, allowing Beijing not only to restrict shipments of raw materials and magnets — as it has in the past — but also any devices that incorporate those elements. Because Chinese rare earths are embedded in everything from iPhones and electric vehicle motors to fighter-jet sensors, the rules effectively give Beijing potential veto power over vast swaths of global manufacturing.

The vast potential reach of China’s action, and the U.S.’s counteraction, was on display Friday: Trump’s tariff announcement sent stocks tumbling, with the S&P 500 dropping more than 2 percent, its worst day since April.
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New Trump slogan: Make America Sick Again!

In previous government shutdowns, federal employees were furloughed and not paid during it but when the shutdown ended, they were brought back and given their back pay. This time Trump first said that they may not get any back pay and then upped the ante by saying that he will begin firing them. He and the Republicans seem to think that this will put pressure on the Democrats to acquiesce to their demand to approve a short-term spending bill that will result in cutting health care subsidies under Obamacare that made health insurance premiums more affordable.

Over the weekend, people started getting fired. It seems like the first firings are targeting health care workers and had been planned even before the shutdown.
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Trump will be mad that Nobel committee says, “No peace prize for you!”

This year’s Nobel peace prize was awarded to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado and Trump will be mad that he did not get it.

The peace prize was tarnished when it was awarded to the war criminal Henry Kissinger and it did not redeem itself when it gave the prize to Barack Obama who had done nothing to deserve it. But Trump clearly feels that he too deserves it and has been campaigning hard for it.

While Trump has played down his chances to win the prize, he has been active behind the scenes, phoning Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s finance minister, in Oslo this summer to tell him he wanted to discuss the “Nobel peace prize … and tariffs”. He regularly brings up the award; usually as he makes the tenuous claim to have ended six or seven wars since his return to the White House.

“If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Trump said last year during the presidential race.

The obsession has become a running joke among foreign diplomats seeking to lobby their interests, including at a regular breakfast among European ambassadors where a common topic is how to keep Trump engaged in the support of Ukraine.

“Anytime he is talking about solving seven wars, he is really sending a message: give me the Nobel,” said one senior European diplomat based in Washington.

Trump’s new push for a peace deal to end the [Gaza] war kicked into gear during last month’s UN general assembly, where he met with Arab leaders and then approved a 20-point peace plan that he announced during a White House summit with Benjamin Netanyahu in late September.

The timeline for the award has played an active role in trying to reach a deal this week, as officials have regularly said they believed a peace deal would be ready by Friday – the same day as the Nobel committee announces its choice.

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US policies are shifting global alliances

That India has for some time been a rising economic power, there can be no doubt. It has now surpassed China as the world’s most populous country and having a large domestic market undoubtedly helps in the creation of large businesses and industry. For the longest time, relations between US and India were cool, mainly because India, starting with its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, pursued a non-aligned foreign policy that chose to not align itself with either of the then two main power blocs of the US and the USSR. As a result, The US tended to see India’s traditional rival Pakistan as more of an ally and favored it.

That changed quite dramatically with the rise to power of Narendra Modi as prime minister, a right wing Hindu chauvinist who assiduously cultivated good relations with the US, especially with Trump. And for a while, the two seemed to be best friends. But recently, there has been a dramatic cooling of relations, with Trump putting some of the harshest tariffs on imports from India.

Isaac Chotiner tries to understand the dramatic shift by talking with Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As Vaishnav says, the 50% tariff on India is a major blow to India..
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September jobs data not released

Today is the first Friday of the month, the day when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly report giving the number os jobs gained or lost in the previous month plus any revisions to the numbers for the two preceding months. The last two jobs reports were awful, with job growth essentially stalled since May, indicating that the growth in economy has slowed dramatically, possibly indicating a recession. Trump fired the commissioner of the BLS in early August following the dismal job numbers for July (claiming that she had dishonestly manipulated the numbers to make him look bad) but things got even worse when the August numbers were released.

However the BLS did not release any numbers today and the official reason is that it is due to the shutdown. But that seems likely (what a surprise!) to be a lie.

The data for the release have already been collected, according to two former heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But the Trump administration has so far defied calls to publish the report.

Earlier this week William Beach, who led the BLS for four years under Trump and Joe Biden, also said the jobs data for September “have been completely collected and processed” by the BLS. “The jobs report is likely written in final draft,” he wrote.

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Chicago fights back against ICE thuggery

The Guardian sent a reporter and camera crew to cover what is happening in Chicago as ICE sends its thugs there to harass the people of the city and how the people are responding.

The video also highlights Kat Abughazaleh, a 25-year old woman who is running to get the Democratic nomination to represent the 9th congressional district and was flung to the ground by an ICE thug during a protest. The district is currently represented by a Democratic congresswoman who is not running for re-election.

Abughazaleh’s platform aligns with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She favors expanding government support for childcare, universal preschool, Medicare for All (including healthcare for undocumented immigrants).

She is a supporter of LGBTQ and transgender rights, as well as the Green New Deal. Abughazaleh favors increased regulations on artificial intelligence.

News organizations in Illinois nationally and internationally covered Abughazaleh’s announcement and subsequent campaign. Politico cited Bernie Sanders who encouraged progressives to run as independent candidates in the light of declining popularity of the party, and The Washington Post noted the possibility of her campaign being part of an anti-incumbent movement akin to the Tea Party. News coverage of Abughazaleh’s use of digital media, including Bluesky (rather than Musk’s X), predicted her skills would help her appeal to younger voters. Coverage also compared her to other younger candidates (including several new media “stars”) with progressive political stances who are seeking major US political offices, such as Zohran Mamdani, Isaiah Martin,Jake Rakov, George Hornedo, Saikat Chakrabarti, Elijah Manley, Mallory McMorrow, and Deja Foxx, and placed her in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s camp of “younger, energetic, left-leaning Democrats” who are “blunt about Democratic errors and missteps.

We definitely need to light a fire under the weak Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who have shown themselves incapable of rising to meet the challenge posed by Trump and MAGA authoritarianism.

The damage done to autism research

I wrote before how the actions of the Trump administration are eerily reminiscent of the Lysenko era in the former Soviet Union when Trofim Lysenko used the power of the government to suppress genetics research that did not agree with his prejudices, setting back agriculture in the country for decades. It is clear that the ghost of Lysenko now haunts the White House and the office of RFK Jr, as they have both decided that they only want to see research that supports what they already believe

The extraordinary press conference where Trump and RFK Jr. inveighed against the over-the-counter pain-killer Tylenol (the brand name for the drug acetaminophen) took people by surprise, even though we should be used be used by now to this duo pushing crackpot theories that have little or no factual basis.

For years, scientists have studied a possible link between pregnant mothers’ use of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and neurological conditions like autism and A.D.H.D. The findings are complex. Some studies suggest a link; others do not. None have found proof of a causal relationship.

Yet Trump spoke as if the connection were definitive. He instructed pregnant women to avoid the drug. “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it,” he said.

It s easy for him to say. But what are pregnant women supposed to do when they need an analgesic?
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