Yesterday’s News 2025 11 29

curated news excerpts & citations

Dispatch: The 19th-Century Influencer Who Invented Thanksgiving

How Sarah Josepha Hale used fashion, fiction, and sheer persistence to give America its beloved holiday.
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By the time Lincoln read her letter in September 1863, the country was exhausted. Gettysburg had ended two months earlier with unimaginable casualties. Families were fractured, states were bitterly divided, and the very idea of a United States felt fragile. Hale’s proposal arrived not as a domestic nicety but as a cultural intervention—a way to call a bleeding nation to the same table, if only for a day. In a world where families were split by battle lines, the image of a shared feast—of turkey, pies, and a moment of gratitude—offered unity where politics could not.

In October 1863, Lincoln issued a proclamation establishing a national day of Thanksgiving. Lincoln’s own language echoed Hale’s persuasive vision: He called the nation to give thanks “with one heart and one voice,” inviting citizens in every corner of the Union—including those “at sea” and “sojourning in foreign lands”—to pause together. He urged Americans not only to offer gratitude but also to “commend to [God’s] tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers” in the war, and to implore divine help “to heal the wounds of the nation.” In the middle of brutal civil strife, Lincoln took up Hale’s idea that gratitude to God and for each other could be a form of national repair.

(Dispatch more…)

• Closer to the Edge: The Fascist who wrote a manifesto on Thanksgiving

  Donald Trump didn’t wish America a Happy Thanksgiving. He hurled a brick of racist fertilizer at the country, lit it on fire, and rang the doorbell like a bored teenager who never emotionally matured past 7th grade.
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  “The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.”

  (Closer to the Edge more…)

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• Thom Hartmann: If Hegseth Gave an Order to “Kill Everybody,” He Must Be Removed and Prosecuted

  And if Donald Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law…
  

  
  
  
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  Even if a war did exist, Huntley notes, the order to kill wounded, unarmed survivors “would in essence be an order to show no quarter,” which is defined under the Geneva Conventions as a war crime.

  This isn’t an obscure legal debate. This is basic civilization. Armed states do not execute helpless people in the water.

  And yet this is now U.S. policy. The boat strike on September 2 was not a one–off. It was the beginning of a campaign.
  (Thom Hartmann more…)
  

  
  
  

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• NY Times: Trump Announces Pardon for Honduran Ex-President Convicted in Drug Case

  President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.

  The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquin Guzman, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.

  The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. And prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine.
  (NY Times more…)

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• WSJ: Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine

  Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – November 28, 2025

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  Tonight, Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report that Witkoff, Kushner, and Dmitriev designed their plan to bypass U.S. national security officials and create opportunities for U.S. businessmen to win multibillion-dollar deals to develop energy and rare-earth minerals in Russia, Ukraine, and the Arctic. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals,” the journalists report, “Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”
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  The idea of stripping some of the country’s 24.5 million naturalized citizens of their citizenship changes the nature of what it means to be an American. As Faiza Patel and Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center noted last month, from 1990 to 2017 only about 11 people a year lost their citizenship, usually for having hidden serious criminal activity or human rights violations in applying for citizenship. In contrast, observers today note that when Hitler came to power in 1933, the German government began to strip Jews, as well as Roma and political opponents, of their German citizenship, paving the way for the confiscation of their property, their rights, and eventually their lives.
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  The administration justifies its strikes on the Venezuelan boats by claiming to fight “narcoterrorism,” but today Trump announced a full pardon for former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty last year by an American jury of conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. He was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. Trump announced the pardon on social media, writing “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”

  Tonight, Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and the committee’s top Democrat, Jack Reed (D-RI), issued a statement saying: “The Committee is aware of recent news reports—and the Department of Defense’s initial response—regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
  (Heather Cox Richardson more…)

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• Qasim Rashid, Esq.: Nigeria, “Christian Genocide” and the Right Wing Attempt To Create More War

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  Donald Trump, right wing evangelicals, even alleged Democratic pundits like Bill Maher, now claim Christians in Nigeria are suffering genocide. Meanwhile, Nigerian scholars—Christian and Muslim alike—are making clear that the violence in Nigeria is political and indiscriminate, not religious and targeted. Moreover, they’re standing united against the extremist factions who are killing both Christians and Muslims alike. No one wins with disinformation—except those looking to create more hate and war.
  (Qasim Rashid, Esq. more…)

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• Brian Allen: A Judge Blocked Her Deportation. ICE Sent Her to Honduras Anyway.

  A nineteen-year-old college student was preparing to surprise her family for Thanksgiving. Instead, she was taken into ICE custody at Boston Logan Airport, flown to Texas, and deported to Honduras within hours. The most alarming fact is that a federal judge had already issued an order preventing her removal and blocking the government from transferring her out of Massachusetts. According to her attorney, that order was ignored, overridden, or never reached the officials who carried out the deportation.
  (Brian Allen more…)

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• Al Jazeera: Jenin killings latest example of Israel’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy

  The killing of two unarmed Palestinian men as they surrendered to Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin is the latest example of a practice that, while shocking, is not extraordinary.
  (Al Jazeera more…)

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• NBC: Surging measles cases are ‘fire alarm’ warning that other diseases could be next

  As measles cases continue to rise around the globe, the World Health Organization warns it’s a signal that other disease outbreaks could soon follow.

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  GriftMatrix

  Trump Action Tracker

  Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift

  Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda

  Trump Pardons Database

  Project 2025 Tracker

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  ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew

  Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties

  1. The Impact Map
  2. United States Disappeared Tracker
  3. ICE Flight Tracking
  4. Regulatory Changes Tracker
  5. Trump Administration Litigation Trackers
  6. Far Right Groups Targeting Pride Month