curated news excerpts & citations
Jennifer Rubin: The ‘buck stops’ nowhere
President Harry S. Truman had a sign on his desk that read “The buck stops here.” President Carter actually borrowed Truman’s sign. President Barack Obama said “The buck stops with me” after a failed terrorist attack. President Joe Biden said the same about the messy end of the war in Afghanistan. But in Donald Trump’s regime, bucks never get near the Oval Office. If you listen to the MAGA cult, neither Trump nor any regime official is responsible, accountable, or to blame for anything.
The killing of one national guardsman and severe wounding of another in D.C. was a tragedy and an outrage. The killer, of course, should be punished to the full extent of the law. But to ignore Trump’s egregious decision-making that brought us to this point of reckless political violence is to invite further tragedies and condone grievous incompetence.
No matter how furiously Trump and his minions try to spin the narrative, Biden cannot be blamed for this one. Trump’s crew granted asylum to the suspected killer this April. Most importantly, Trump and MAGA governors who comply with the president’s whims and who send national guardsmen around the country willy-nilly for tasks they are not trained to perform are responsible for their safety. The guardsmen who were attacked should never have been there.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)
Brian Allen: The Zero Unit Ghost: How a CIA-Backed Fighter Slipped Into America and Ended Up at the Center of the D.C. National Guard Shooting
Guardian: US admiral to brief lawmakers as bipartisan scrutiny grows over boat strike
Raw Story: Admiral taken aback by lack of planning in Trump strikes
Guardian: Pete Hegseth told US soldiers in Iraq to ignore legal advice on rules of engagement
Joyce Vance: Bulletproof no more
Financial Times: Pete Hegseth invokes ‘fog of war’ as backlash grows over strikes on boats
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – December 2, 2025
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Today, at a televised meeting, Trump’s Cabinet officers rallied around the president, telling him he is brilliant and a miracle worker, and Trump threw his support behind Hegseth. Clearly, the president intends to stand by the weekend Fox News Channel host he installed in one of the most important positions in the United States government.Shortly after the meeting, PBS NewsHour journalist Nick Schifrin reported that a U.S. official told him “[t]he US military struck the boat on September 2_four_times: twice to kill the 11 people who were on board, and twice more to sink the boat.”
Trump is slipping. After he drew attention by posting wildly on social media last night, today’s meeting was clearly designed to demonstrate that the president is alert, active, and on top of things. But this made-for-television photo opportunity was anything but a display of competence: Trump could not stay awake while his Cabinet members were praising him, and so we had the wild visual of Secretary of State Marco Rubio praising Trump as the only man who could end Russia’s war in Ukraine, gesturing at the president sitting next to him, who was, to all appearances, sound asleep.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Jay Kuo: Double-Tap Gate: A Case Study in Gaslighting
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If you feel a disquieting revulsion witnessing Karoline Leavitt spout talking points about killing “narco-terrorists,” your sensibilities don’t need adjusting. Anyone paying attention understands that the whole idea is nothing more than a cynical framing designed to create a false pretext for U.S. military action.To see why, we need to deconstruct “narco-terrorism” as a concept. When we think of “terrorism,” it’s typically some kind of public act of violence, often in pursuit of a political or religious ideology, that is designed to sow fear in order to topple a state or change its behavior.
But “narco” drug traffickers aren’t trying to achieve anything except to maximize their own profits. They may deploy terror and violence against rival groups or local law enforcement to further this goal, but the cartels are not trying to topple the U.S. government or fundamentally change our society.
That’s why the idea that we need the full weight of the U.S. military to strike and kill “terrorists” who are allegedly smuggling drugs to our shores doesn’t sit right. What’s more, we are somehow actively targeting Venezuela, which isn’t even a significant source of truly dangerous drugs such as fentanyl to the U.S.
(Jay Kuo more…)Malcolm Nance: SEAL Team Six on Ground in Venezuela
The Washington Post article gave hints that troops have likely been operating on the ground in Venezuela since August.
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Steward Beckham: Venezuelan Oil
Miguel Tinker Salas’s Staying the Course: United States Oil Companies in Venezuela, 1945–1958 explores a pivotal era in Venezuelan history. One often mythologized as a break from dictatorship and a leap toward democracy. Yet as Salas shows, oil remained the ruling language. …
…Today, as human rights abuses mount and migration surges, oil profiteering remains a life-or-death game, not just for Venezuela, but for the geopolitical chessboard it sits on. And the recent moves by the Trump administration, including militarized threats and ambiguous airspace decrees, are not aberrations. They’re the mask-off version of a much older playbook.
…Reflecting on Trump Derangement Syndrome
Spencer Ackerman wrote a searing piece about the now-slow-dripping horrors of the boat strikes in the Caribbean. …His piece got me thinking about Trump Derangement Syndrome, not the MAGA-fied insult tossed at liberals on cable news, but the quieter, more insidious form found in donor-fed media and institutional op-ed land. It’s the kind that insists every grotesque development in Trump’s America is a deviation from some imagined moral high ground, rather than the logical, maskless evolution of a system already cracking its knuckles.
Trump didn’t just fall out of the sky like a lightning bolt. He was forged in the backlash to civil rights, in the bipartisan romance with market fundamentalism, in the smoldering ruins of a post-Cold War consensus that replaced material progress with PR and vibes. He rose out of a landscape where inequality widened, social trust eroded, and the only consistent ideology was protecting capital. That consensus still calls itself the “center,” even as the country burns from the edges inward.
(Steward Beckham more…)
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Adam Kinzinger: Ukraine Is Winning — So Why Is America Ready to Force a Surrender?
The Hidden Agenda Behind Trump’s “Peace Plan”
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Brian Allen: Costco vs. MAGA: The Warehouse Giant That Refused To Bow
How a bulk-goods retailer became the newest target of right-wing fury, and why the backlash exposes a deeper political fracture.
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Economist: America is foolishly waving goodbye to thousands of Chinese boffins
Hostile policies and attacks on science are driving them back into China’s arms
CHINESE-BORN brainiacs have long been at the forefront of innovation in America. Yang Chen-Ning, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist who died in October, was one such. But a mixture of pushes (such as the hostility of Donald Trump’s administration to all sorts of newcomers) and pulls (including China’s lavish support for science and tech) mean many are now following the path Yang took later in life: he returned to China in his 80s to teach at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Today, a host of Chinese youngsters are also choosing not to go to America to study at all.
(Economist more…)
James Eagle: China’s rapid chip rise is gathering pace
China is accelerating its own semiconductor future. While the world watches Nvidia’s next launch, China is building depth. Not parity. Depth. A domestic stack strong enough to close the gap on its own terms. It mirrors the pattern in clean energy where battery storage has shifted from exotic to essential as costs collapse and capacity grows at astonishing speed. Both stories point to the same force that China has been supplying the word. Scale now creates its own momentum, which is what China is doing.
(James Eagle more…)
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Fortune: Michael Dell talks candidly about his $6.25 billion donation to fund Invest America accounts for 25 million American children
It’s been almost 42 years since Michael Dell founded the pioneering PC company now known as Dell Technologies (No. 44 on the Fortune 500) in his freshman dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin. A decade later, he started to give his wealth away, formalizing his philanthropic efforts in 1999 with the establishment of the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.
(Fortune more…)Michael & Susan Dell: We’re Committing $6.25 Billion to Give 25 Million Children a Financial Head Start
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Wired: DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now
Contrary to popular reports, DOGE has “burrowed into the agencies like ticks,” government sources tell WIRED.
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Snopes: FBI paid nearly $1M in overtime to redact Epstein files, documents show
AlterNet: Deputy FBI director under fire after internal emails reveal Epstein redactions
Bloomberg: Inside the FBI’s Review and Redaction of Epstein Files
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Daily Beast: Donald Trump Posts Once a Minute in Unhinged Late-Night Spree
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Borowitz: Trump Boasts That International Criminal Court in The Hague Has Invited Him to Receive Award
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Decoding Fox News: Happy Let’s Blame the Democrats Day on Fox News!
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
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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