Blog Betty (Thomas Friedman is a Great Man was an online novel): 12/28/25

Saturday, January 03, 2026

That Crooked Court

I loved Diana Ross' performance. I liked how you pulled a number of songs together -- "I'm Coming Out," "The Boss," "Upside Down," "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "Tomorrow" -- that last one from THANK YOU.

Now for The Crooked Court. Anna Commander (NEWSWEEK) reports:

The majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have failed in rising to the occasion during a critical period in America when their voices are “desperately needed,” former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance wrote in her Substack Civil Discourse about Chief Justice John Roberts’ year-end report on Friday.

The 2025 report from Roberts comes at a time when the highest court in the land is under heightened scrutiny due to political pressures from President Donald Trump’s second administration, ongoing concerns about judicial independence and intensified public skepticism toward the court.

The 13-page report touched on the history and principles behind judicial independence, including life tenure and salary protections for judges, but avoided direct discussion of contemporary political conflicts involving the federal judiciary. Roberts noted President Calvin Coolidge’s call to “turn for solace” to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution “amid all the welter of partisan politics.”

Roberts briefly referenced historical events, including the attempted impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase in 1805, which set a precedent for judicial independence free from political retribution. However, direct mention of recent events—like Trump’s public criticisms of lower court rulings and his calls for the impeachment of federal judges—was notably absent.

Vance called out Roberts in her Substack over a picture chosen for the report, which showed an empty room.

“The past decade has made it clear that our institutions are only as strong as the people in them. That makes this photo a startling choice for a report about the judiciary, albeit likely unintentional,” Vance said. “But it’s a marker for what has become increasingly clear: that the majority on this Court has failed to show up in a moment when their institutional voice is desperately needed. The Court has been either unwilling or incapable of meeting the challenge to democracy that Donald Trump poses.”

Those are some strong points and LEGAL AF makes some strong points in the video below.

"The Snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLD):

Friday, January 2, 2026. As the new year begins, Chump continues his efforts to destroy American healthcare, though he'd like it to be The Epstein Scandal is not over and more details are emerging, Megyn Kelly drops her pretense to 'care' about sexual assault and to have been a 'victim' of it, and much more.

Starting with this press release issued by Senator Alex Padilla's office yesterday:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) issued the following statement after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted its stay on a federal judge’s order barring the Trump Administration from deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles, ending the federalization of California’s National Guard and returning authority over them to the state:

“Today’s order affirms what we’ve said from the beginning: the Trump Administration’s choice to federalize and deploy National Guard troops in Los Angeles was unlawful. This deployment is reckless, harmful, and an abuse of executive power that has put service members in an impossible position.

“The fight is not over but I look forward to the remaining service members returning to their families, their jobs, and their primary critical missions as soon as possible.”

###

Moving over to the late Jeffrey Epstein who was Donald Chump's roll dog and best buddy for years and years as Epstein sex trafficked girls and women. Meredith Kile (PEOPLE MAGAZINE) notes:

A new report from the Wall Street Journal alleges that Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago spa had teenage workers make house calls to Jeffrey Epstein's mansion.

The report, which cites unnamed former Mar-a-Lago and Epstein employees, claims that Trump's spa would send masseuses, manicurists and other spa workers to Epstein's nearby residence.

"Epstein wasn’t a dues-paying member of the club, but Trump told staff to treat him like one, the employees said," according to the report.

It also alleges that workers "warned each other about Epstein, who was known among staff for being sexually suggestive and exposing himself during the appointments."

[. . .]

Though Trump has continued to downplay his longtime friendship with Epstein since taking office for his second term, there was a disturbing mention of the president in the last drop of evidence.

One of the documents, dated Oct. 27, 2020, appeared to be an FBI intake report that featured the account of a former limo driver, who claimed to have met Trump in 1995, when he said he drove the real estate mogul to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

The document read, "[Driver] reported some of the things President Trump had spoken about during the ride while on his cell phone were very concerning. [Driver] reported he was 'a few seconds from pulling the limousine over on the median and within a few seconds of pulling him out of the car and hurting him, due to some of the things he was saying.' "

While telling the story to an unnamed woman years later, the driver alleged that the woman went "stone cold."

"[Woman] stated, 'He raped me,'" the FBI intake report read. "[Driver] said, 'What?' as [Woman] replied 'Donald J. Trump had raped her along with Jeffrey Epstein.' "

Chump supposedly banned Epstein from the resort but did he continue to send employees to do house visits? Was Chump was under the impression he wasn't aiding a crime if it didn't take place on his property? Because that's not how aiding and abetting works -- by sending his employees into a known environment for sexual assault, Donald Chump himself would be guilty as a partner to any crime. TMZ notes:

Donald Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein may be even worse than previously thought ... according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ says DT's Mar-a-Lago spa in Florida would send teenage workers to Epstein's mansion, despite it being an open secret among the staff that the billionaire would sometimes expose himself during appointments.

Shaun King (THE NORTH STAR) observes:

But the moral question isn’t simply, “Did Trump eventually kick him out?” The question is: why was the pipeline allowed to exist at all, and why was there no real accountability when staff reported misconduct?

Because here’s another key detail the Journal reported: the 18-year-old disclosed the incident to Mar-a-Lago’s HR team, but the incident was not reported to Palm Beach police, according to former employees and police. Police didn’t begin investigating Epstein until two years later, after a parent reported Epstein molested a 14-year-old girl.

Sit with that: an 18-year-old reports pressure for sex after being sent to Epstein’s home, and there’s no police report. That is not a minor administrative choice. That’s a decision that protects the institution and leaves other young women exposed.

This is what people miss when they reduce Epstein to a cartoon villain. A villain is one man. A system is what protects him.

TMZ also notes:

One of the members of the U.S. House Oversight Committee that's been releasing photos and documents from the Jeffrey Epstein estate has a New Year's resolution for the Epstein Files ... he wants to totally expose and put away the pedophile's enablers.

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat from Virginia who sits on the committee, tells TMZ ... "My New Year's Resolution for the Epstein Files is to get the files released, name names, and let the courts and the court of public opinion judge those who perpetrated, covered up, and enabled these crimes so that they never happen again."

And Subramanyam says Ghislaine Maxwell is one of their targets ... despite her currently serving a 20-year sentence in prison after being convicted of sex trafficking minors and other federal charges. He says Maxwell "should absolutely be held accountable for all the crimes she committed, including newly discovered crimes."

For those who've forgotten the ongoing release of documents taking place currently took an act of Congress. Prior to that, Chump referred to the crimes that took place as a "hoax" and refused to release documents. Also a point to remember, the law passed by Congress mandated that all documents be released by December 19th. That did not happen. Attorney General Pam da Bimbo Bondi refused to comply with the law and the bulk of the documents remain hidden from the public.

On the topic of the documents, let's note this video.

Lastly, CBS NEWS reports there are problems regarding the official story on Jeffrey Epstein's death and the actual camera recording devices.

Meanwhile, THE DAILY BEST has an interview that's getting media attention.

Pranita Chaubey (INQUISITR) reports:

Donald Trump’s name continues to pop up every time there is a mention of the Epstein Files, and now, longtime Trump biographer Michael Wolff has revealed that Donald Trump befriended Jeffrey Epstein for all the wrong reasons.

Longtime Donald Trump biographer Wolff revealed during Inside Trump’s Head Podcast that the two men allegedly shared a girlfriend. “This is [around] 1993, 1994, and Marla Maples (Trump’s former wife) is now coming into this picture, but it is also the moment in which Epstein and Trump are sharing a girlfriend,” said Wolff.

Wolff claimed that the two even had the same girlfriend once. The biographer revealed, “This is a Norwegian model and whatever the arrangement is, back and forth, I mean—again, they are playing with someone, and this is their shared, not only girlfriend, but kind of a shared joke.”

As a part of the bombshell Epstein files dump, an email link had a mention of a Norwegian cosmetics heiress, accompanied by a text from Epstein that read: “My 20-year-old girlfriend in ’93, that after two years I gave to Donald.”

It's a sad life but no one's mourning Chump. Not even with all his health problems is anyone feeling sympathetic toward the vulgarian. Hannah Demissie (ABC NEWS) reports:

For weeks, President Donald Trump has said that he received an MRI at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in October, but when asked about the procedure by the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Thursday, Trump and his doctor said that he actually got a CT scan instead.

"It wasn’t an MRI," Trump told the Journal. “It was less than that. It was a scan.”

Last month, Trump maintained that he got an MRI, telling reporters on Air Force One that he would "absolutely" release the results.

The White House has not specifically said why Trump received the scan. In November, Trump claimed the MRI was part of his yearly physical.

Trump’s physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella told the Journal that the president had received a CT scan -- not an MRI. Barbabella said Trump’s doctors initially told him they would perform either an MRI or a CT scan.

THE DAILY BEAST's David Gardner adds, "Donald Trump has confirmed that he wore compression socks to treat his cankles amid growing scrutiny over his health as America's oldest president."

Let's use his dementia and declining health to address his treatment of Marjorie Taylor Greene one more time. Alex Nguyen (MOTHER JONES) notes:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said that her defense of survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and threat to disclose the identities of some of the men who abused them broke her relationship with President Donald Trump, who said his “friends will get hurt” if she went through with it.

Greene’s claim came in remarks from two long interviews published Monday in the New York Times Magazine. After a closed-door meeting with Epstein victims in September and a subsequent news conference where she made the threat to share the names of some of the men, Greene said Trump rebuked her.

“The Epstein files represent everything wrong with Washington,” the congresswoman told Robert Draper of New York Times Magazine, highlighting how Epstein went unpunished for decades and was allowed to continue to sexually assault girls and young women.

Greene announced in November that she would resign on January 5, 2026, a year before her term ends. “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked, and used by rich, powerful men should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for,” she stated in the video.

TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE. It's not just a John Ford play from the 1600s by John Ford, it's also Megyn Kelly's brand. Which is why you did not find me defending her when she came forward to talk about her 'victimizing' by Roger Aisles. It was known, even if outlets didn't report it, that Megyn was a party girl, a party girl who used her body to work her way to the top. She wasn't a victim. And she only came forward when others had outed Roger Aisles -- her mentor whom she was so close to in the public eye and now needed to break away from him lest people catch on that her rise at FOX "NEWS" resulted from a I'll-scratch-your-pudenda-if-you-scratch-my-testicles. If you grasp that, then you'll understand her latest nonsense which Loren Piretra reports on in the video below.

In other news of Tramp Media, Bari Weiss is in the news. Tom Boggiono (RAW STORY) reports:

A video from CBS News posted to X on New Year's Day, designed to introduce the journalistic path recently promoted CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil will be taking, was greeted with no small measure of skepticism on social media.

Since the controversial Bari Weiss was picked to run the CBS News division despite a lack of experience in television news, every move has been scrutinized and Dokoupil’s pledge reaffirmed concerns about the dismantling of journalistic standards.

Coming not long after Weiss spiked a “60 Minutes” investigation into the horrific experiences of migrants detained by ICE and transferred to El Salvador's CECOT prison facility, Dokopuil’s comment that “the press has missed the story” too often set off a wave of derision and accusations of dumbing down the news.

Ava and I noted Bari in yesterday's "Media: The best and the worst of TV showed up in December" about her censoring a 60 MINUTES news segment:

She has repeatedly insisted that her problem was news value and that the program didn't live up to it.

How did a town hall with the widow of a racist live up to it?

We may be doing another piece on racism in the near future, in terms of people trying to justify racism on the basis of a Black performer and pretending that he and a TV performer were on the same playing field when in fact the program has been notoriously racist over the years, that the power structure was racist and that the Black performer was a guest on one episode. They try to pretend this was an equal playing field when it was no such thing.

We bring that up because when Chump's right wing buddies took over CBS, this was White people and they installed White Bari Weiss. And she and the power structure chose to present the wife of a racist -- who echoes his racists opinions -- and treat her as some sort of expert who should be allowed to pontificate for one hour of prime time TV.

Mary Whitfill Roeloffs (FORBES) noted, "An hour-long interview with the widow of political commentator Charlie Kirk on CBS criticized for its editorial approach drove away big advertisers without drawing a hoped-for big audience in what could be a defining moment for Bari Weiss, the newly appointed editor in chief of CBS News." Brian Steinberg (VARIETY) noted, "Viewership was off 11% compared to the average viewership in the hour year to date, according to data from Nielsen, and the “demo” audience was down 41% compared to its year-to-date average." Justin Baragona (INDEPENDENT) makes the poor performance look even worse by bringing basic facts, "Making the low viewership for the Erika Kirk town hall even more striking is that CBS pulled in a large audience for the annual Army-Navy game that afternoon, drawing 7.3 million viewers per Nielsen’s early measurement. The post-game show, which served as a lead-in for the Kirk-Weiss chat, attracted a viewership of 3.5 million and 901,000 in the advertising demo, according to Nielsen." Even with a huge lead-in, the 'news' special flopped. THE NEW YORK POST explained it wasn't even a hit on YOUTUBE.

Maybe Bari Weiss needs to answer for that?

And maybe the new owners of CBS and PARAMOUNT need to answer to shareholders about why they paid Bari $150 million for her website -- that's about $149 million more than it was worth.

Mainly we should all be aware that Bari Weis killing that news segment on 60 MINUTES was censorship.

She had all these excuse about how it wasn't news and it wasn't ready.

But she's the one who put on an Erika Kirk special. Three months and three days after racist Charlie Kirk was shot dead, she put on an Erika Kirk special.

How did that qualify as news?

Are we supposed to pretend that Erika had anything to share? She's still working through the stages of grief described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in ON DEATH AND DYING. She's not come out of the grief, she has no lessons to share, she's garnered no perspective. If anything, she's avoided dealing with her grief and loss.

This month alone, Sean Hannity interviewed her on December 8th, she took part in THE NEW YORK TIMES DealBook Summit, she showed on Megyn Kelly's show, she showed up on Glenn Beck's show, and on December 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st she was part of AMERICAFEST. That's not a full listing of her events and appearances

She's not taken time to grieve and she's overexposed.

How was she ever going to have anything worth sharing -- let alone anything news worthy worth sharing?

She wasn't. Nor will JD Vance when Bari sits down with him for another 'news special' next month. She'll baby him as well. Spend a whole hour babying him. Failing to grasp that her job as an interviewer is to push back, is to question. Bari Weis has neither the skills nor the training to be an editor-in-chief as she's made that clear. And she didn't need to wait until 2026 to share that with America.

Lastly, the new year has begun and with it? Chump's latest attempt to destroy the American people. Reed Abelson (NEW YORK TIMES) reports this morning:

Renee Rubin Ross is facing the stark reality of having to pay much more for her health insurance this year, now that Congress has ended 2025 without extending the enhanced federal tax credits that brought down the cost of her coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

“I don’t even know how to get my mind around it. It’s the opposite of affordable,” said Ms. Ross, who relies on Obamacare to cover her family of four in California. Staying on the same plan for 2026 will cost about $4,000 a month, $2,700 more than the roughly $1,300 per month she had been paying.

Since the subsidies were first expanded in 2021, allowing more people to qualify and lowering their payments, millions of Americans have benefited. A record 24 million people enrolled in Obamacare for 2025, with a vast majority receiving some tax credits. Many were self-employed or worked for small businesses that did not offer health insurance.

But without the enhanced subsidies, many people are seeing the cost of coverage more than double, increasing by hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month, because the tax credits are now in line with what they were before.

2025 end of the year pieces include Rebecca's "hottest men of 2025," Ann's "2025 in films" and Stan's "2025 in films," Mike's "Idiot of the Year," Martha & Shirley's "2025 in books (Martha & Shirley)," Kat's "Kat's Korner: 2025 in music," Ruth's "Ruth's Media Report 2025," Ava and my "Media: The best and the worst of TV showed up in December" and my "2025: The Year Of The Jig Is Up."

The following sites updated:

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

The Crooked Court's duplicitous Amy Comey Barrett

ABOVE THE LAW's Joe Patrice has an important column which includes:

Appearing on Fox News to continue the publicity blitz for her “studiously bland” memoir, Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett began laying the groundwork for her upcoming 2028 opinion requiring states to let Donald Trump run for a third term notwithstanding the whole “Constitution” thing. Brett Baier, the Andy Cohen of this Real Justices of Washington D.C. production, asked Barrett specifically about the Twenty-Second Amendment’s bar on Trump’s possible First Consul for Life bid.

Well, you know, the answer we were looking for was “yes.”

This isn’t like the First Amendment, where a legal scholar can debate the limitations and exceptions and tradeoffs inherent in the freedoms it protects (including the one Barrett can’t remember). The Twenty-Second Amendment is astoundingly explicit. Presidents can’t serve more than two terms.

But the official Trump store is selling “Trump 2028” hats so the writing is on the wall — or hat, as the case may be — as to the president’s intention.

Republicans have already started floating new amendments to get around this. First, they suggested lifting the term limit altogether before realizing that this would result in Barack Obama symbolically pulling Trump’s diaper off in while the country pointed and laughed. Then conservatives got really high and pitched an alternative that allows presidents to run again as long as they got pummeled in an intervening election and got Grover Clevelanded.

But with no urgent action on these proposed amendments, it seems as though the Trump camp is warming to the simpler solution of just letting the Supreme Court erase the Twenty-Second Amendment the way it erased the Fourteenth Amendment’s bar on insurrectionists.

The real Amy, the corrupt Amy. Tries to hard to pretend otherwise. But she's as corrupt as the other five conservatives on the Crooked Court.

"The Snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Tuesday, December 30, 2025. As Chump continues to decay, he destroys the economy and proves himself to be the failure so many always told him he was.

ADDED four minutes after THE SNAPSHOT posted. MEIDASTOUCH NEWS video on MTG.

US House Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene has revealed that when Chump tried to pressure her into taking her name off the call for the release of The Epstein Files, he screamed at her that his friends were going to be hurt if that happened. Again, this was added four minutes after THE SNAPSHOT originally posted, all below is from the original posting.

Let's start with the economy going into the new year. Nick Lichtenberg (FORTUNE) reports;

The weakest job market since 2011 is increasingly being framed not as a glitch, but as the new normal—one where growth roars and jobs barely move, leaving a generation asking, “Dude, where’s my job?”

Bank of America Global Research’s “Situation Room” note warned in mid-December that markets are priced for a robust 2026 even as hiring stalls and unemployment rises and recalled a now 25-year-old cult classic stoner comedy starring Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott to make its point.

The entry-level worker would be forgiven, in other words, for feeling about their job search the way Kutcher and Scott felt about their stolen wheels. (In fact, the screenwriter of Dude, Where’s My Car? had a similar take on the show-business labor market, telling The Hollywood Reporter several weeks ago that he’d quit to become a therapist.)

“The job market has been weak this year,” wrote BofA’s Yuri Seliger and Sohyun Marie Lee, commenting on the double payroll report showing weak job growth in October and November. “A lack of recovery in the jobs market and a slower U.S. economy are key risks to watch for in 2026.”

Seliger and Lee flagged what they called the weakest U.S. job market since at least 2011 (with the notable exception of the mass layoff wave from COVID), with growth in monthly payrolls averaging just 17,000 over the past six months—by far the slowest pace of job creation since the Global Financial Crisis. Private payrolls are only modestly stronger at 44,000 on a six‑month average basis, still at their weakest level in well over a decade, while broader U‑6 underemployment has climbed to 8.7% and job openings per unemployed worker have slumped to 1.0, both the softest since 2017.

And FORTUNE's Nick Lichtenberg reports:

A stark new economic analysis reveals the Trump administration’s trade policies are extracting a heavy toll from Main Street, with small-business importers paying approximately $25,000 more per month in tariff costs since April 2025. The report, published Dec. 17 by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-wing think tank, details how a “chaotic approach” to trade and the elimination of key import exceptions have created a financial crisis for entrepreneurs during the critical holiday season.

According to the analysis by Michael Negron and Mimla Wardak, the administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement triggered a sharp increase in duties collected from American businesses. From April through September 2025, CAP estimated, the roughly 236,000 small-business importers in the U.S. paid an average of more than $151,000 in additional tariffs compared to the same period in 2024. (CAP cited the centrist Chamber of Commerce’s research on the small-business importer sector of the economy.)

“The Trump administration’s broad, costly, and frequently shifting policies threaten to undermine one of the strongest engines of the American economy,” Negron said in a statement to Fortune. “A season of opportunity for small businesses has turned into one of uncertainty.”

With regards to small businesses, the Convicted Felon is screwing over the very people who supported him. Paul Krugman points out, "Owners of small businesses are, on average, a strongly right-leaning group. Indeed, along with white Christian nationalists, they are one of the core components of the MAGA base. And small business owners celebrated Donald Trump’s victory last fall." Krugman offers:

But big corporations were much better positioned than small businesses to bear the cost of certifying that the goods they import are “USMCA-compliant.”

Finally, under Trump the United States has moved rapidly toward crony capitalism, a situation in which businesses with strong political connections get favorable treatment. Under this system, big businesses can in effect buy themselves a privileged position. Small businesses can’t.

For example, Apple has so far dodged most of the negative impact of Trump’s tariffs. Over the summer Trump imposed punitive tariffs on India, which is where most iPhones sold in the United States are produced. But for some reason smartphones were exempted from Trump’s India tariffs. What’s the logic behind this exemption? Might it have something to do with the fact that Apple is helping to pay for the construction of the grotesque ballroom that Trump is building to replace the demolished East Wing of the White House?

All of these factors help explain the trends shown in the chart at the top of this post: 2025 was a difficult year for many businesses not benefiting from the AI boom, but it was especially hard on small business.

The economy is screwed up. It's among the many reasons young men are turning against Donald Chump in such large numbers -- see Mike's "Fake males Donald Chump, Joe Rogan and JD Vance" for more reasons. Jobs. Where are the jobs? Going, going, gone to somewhere else. Economist Dean Baker (BEAT THE PRESS) explains:

In Donald Trump’s imagination, trillions of dollars are being invested in the United States. In the real world, factory construction, adjusted for inflation, was down by more than 10 percent from its year ago level, as of August (the most recent data available). Manufacturing employment, based on the data in the monthly employment reports, was down by 73,000 jobs year-over-year in November.

But the actual story on manufacturing employment may be somewhat worse than the monthly jobs data show. The monthly jobs data are based on the Current Employment Situation (CES), a survey that goes to 120,000 businesses and governmental units every month. While it generally gives a reasonably accurate picture of the economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has to impute jobs gained for new firms that are not included in the survey and for firms that don’t answer the survey because they have gone out of business. This “birth-death” imputation tends to be inaccurate when the economy hits a turning point, like a recession.

Since the start of the year, MS NOW's Stephanie Ruhle has noted one of the key problems with Chump's tariffs, for what he has said he is trying to pull off requires moving a lot of manufacturing to this country and that requires manufacturing facilities which do not sprout leaves and buds and grow overnight. There were no plans for building new manufacturing facilities in the US. And even if there were, is there really a labor force left in the country to absorb an increase in massive construction? Berenice Garcia (TEXAS TRIBUNE) reported last week:

One morning in mid-November, Mario Guerrero, the executive director of the South Texas Builders Association, was checking a group chat when a video of federal agents detaining people from a construction site popped up.

He watched the video of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining workers who were pouring cement in front of a home in an idyllic neighborhood here in the Rio Grande Valley.

For nearly a year, Guerrero had seen similar videos or read news reports of arrests and raids. This was the last straw.

The raids and the specter of more to come have struck fear in construction workers, causing many to stay home. ICE agents have arrested more than 9,100 people in South Texas — nearly one-fifth of all such arrests in the entire state since Trump took office, according to government data provided by ICE in response to a FOIA request to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Texas Tribune.

Without enough workers, construction has slowed, sending a ripple effect throughout the economy. Economists suggest that this will drive housing costs up — even as Texas officials focus on bringing such costs down.

That's what happens when you put an idiot conman into the White House. There is no 'synergy,' there is no real plan. Just a lot of 'concepts' that distract from how stupid the idiot truly is. He's a con man who thinks he can trick you with a shell game, he thinks his words will make you believe what's happening isn't actually happening and he'll be able to run his con game just a little bit longer.

Callum Jones and Aliya Uteuova (GUARDIAN) note, "The US economy is thriving, according to Donald Trump: jobs are surging, prices are falling, wages are soaring. The government’s own official statistics paint a more complicated picture of 2025." And Chump's nothing but a liar.

That is the key to his floundering all these years. Rakes and worse have been elevated in NYC society since before the days of Edith Wharton. Outright liars? Not really. And that's why Chump had to haul his fat ass to Florida -- the state of relocation -- long, long ago. He lacked class. He lacked money. And he lacked honesty. He was just a cheap grifter and one scheme after another left others broke as he cut and run with the money. He's hoping his con job this go round lasts long enough for him to be out of the White House while it's just noticeable water leaks in the subpar construction of one of his casinos. I don't think he's going to be that lucky. I don't believe this is anything that can be faux fixed by setting some buckets out in the hallways.

Donald Chump is the little bitch who didn't get the homecoming queen sash years ago and spends the rest of his life complaining about it, in other words, he's Riley Gaines.

Riley can't get over being a loser --she's so like Chump. Three years ago, she came in sixth -- she didn't tie for fifth, Lia Thomas actually beat her by something like a fraction of a second. But they were kind and called fifth place a tie. And it's bit them in the ass ever since. Riley is loser. She may have been on steroids at the time, that would explain the boyish and the breasts that never really developed. She's a physical joke and face is repugnant. I'm a good judge on faces. Sometimes people listen, sometimes they don't. Those who don't later regret it like a friend who cast a man with a repugnant face in the lead of his romantic film almost a decade ago and that was the last film my friend ever directed. He hasn't directed one since and there's no cavalry riding to the rescue to save him. His career's over. And he directed several films that made money. And one bomb -- the one starring a character actor with bad facial structure. Riley has a bizarre and, yes, ugly face.

And Donald Chump is just like her.

Jennifer Bowers Bahney (MEDIAITE) reports:

Attorney General Pam Bondi has confirmed that the Department of Justice is investigating “lawfare” under former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden that she believes amounts to an “ongoing criminal conspiracy.”

In an interview with conservative outlet Just The News, Bondi said she asked prosecutors to probe what she termed the “ongoing election-meddling conspiracy” that she claimed was used to persecute President Donald Trump and his supporters, while protecting Democrats.

So while the economy has tanked, Chump has wasted his time 'on the clock' -- as have these other in the administration taking our tax dollars -- obsessing over the past.

Riley Gaines was never a world class swimmer. She never made it to first place in any real adult race. She was a loser who dreamed of being the best at swimming and now she's left with her failure. Donald's only success has been as a grifter which even he can't take pride in. He's going out a failure -- like his father always told him would happen.

Ewan Gleadow (RAW STORY) reports:

The Republican Party is waiting for Donald Trump to "quit or die," according to a political analyst who believes the party will struggle next year.

The 2026 midterms could be a blowout for Republican candidates, with many dropping out of the race before it really starts. Abrupt resignations and shock retirements throughout the GOP, including ex-Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene and recently Virginia state Senator Bryan Reeves, have sent the party into turmoil.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte, writing in her Substack, noted that "Virginia state Sen. Bryan Reeves abruptly quit his campaign [Sunday] against an incumbent Democratic senator, Mark Warner of Virginia."

"Reeves gave the usual family excuses, but then basically admitted that there’s no point in running when Trump is the party’s leader. 'We must stop the infighting, regroup, and unite behind principled leadership worthy of our cause,' he posted on X."

"As I wrote earlier this month, Republicans are in a holding pattern, basically waiting for Trump to die or finally quit politics, with the latter feeling almost like a pipe dream at this point in time. Some of them increasingly seem to understand that they don’t really have a political party, just a cult of personality. Their best hope is to bide their time and plan on rebuilding the GOP from the ashes once Trump is gone."

Even Karl Rove appears to grasp that.