Category: 2025

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Dean Obeidallah: Donald Trump is officially a PINO: a President in Name Only

… Trump has something else weighing him down that other second term Presidents didn’t have, namely extreme mental and physical decline. (Even Ronald Reagan didn’t show dementia signs 11 months into his second term like Trump.)

That is why Trump is increasingly becoming nothing more than a figurehead. Or more accurately, a PINO: a President in Name Only. And this very concerning for our nation because we don’t know who is actually making decisions!
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Rebecca Solnit: The Paris climate treaty changed the world. Here’s how

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate treaty, one of the landmark days in climate-action history. Attending the conference as a journalist, I watched and listened and wondered whether 194 countries could ever agree on anything at all, and the night before they did, people who I thought were more sophisticated than me assured me they couldn’t. Then they did. There are a lot of ways to tell the story of what it means and where we are now, but any version of it needs respect for the complexities, because there are a lot of latitudes between the poles of total victory and total defeat.
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Miles Taylor: The president just published a “blacklist” of reporters — one giant leap toward autocracy.

Last night, the White House published a video of a laughing Santa Claus entering a home and unfurling a parchment scroll. The music and vibe are festive. But the prop Santa holds is not. It’s a list of journalists and media outlets singled out by the President of the United States — a blacklist.

Throughout history, regimes on the march toward autocracy have relied on ritual humiliation of the press long before they relied on prisons. The press is criticized and branded as an “enemy of the people.” Trump has long done that, and now he’s taking the next step. He’s naming the specific reporters and outlets he deems disloyal, knowing that as long as a large portion of the public accepts that framing, everything that follows becomes easier.
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Fast Company: ‘A willingness to lie’: Why the EPA’s latest Trump-era change is especially concerning

Human activity is driving climate change; that’s a fact that more than 99.9% of scientific papers agree on.

But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has quietly removed that information from a web page explaining climate change’s causes.

It’s yet another move by the Trump administration that downplays climate science. Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax,” repealed numerous climate laws, and has bolstered the use of fossil fuels, the burning of which are the main cause of rising heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.

[current EPA “Causes of Climate Change”
October EPA “Causes of Climate Change”]
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Paul Krugman: Trump Says That You Are the Problem

Everything is perfect. Why aren’t you grateful?
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In fact, until very recently Trump wouldn’t even accept the reality that ordinary Americans don’t share his triumphalism. When Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him a month ago why people are anxious about the economy, Trump replied

I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.

Since then Trump and his minions seem to have come around to admitting that Americans are, in fact, unhappy with the state of the economy. But if the economy is A+++++, why don’t people see it? The problem can’t possibly lie with him — so it must lie with you. “The American people don’t know how good they have it.”

I put that line in quotes because it isn’t a caricature or a paraphrase. It is, in fact, literally what Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the other day:
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Michael Thomas: America is Losing Power Projects When It Needs Them Most

Electricity demand is growing faster than it has in decades in the United States. Data centers, manufacturing reshoring, and electrification are driving massive growth in power consumption. But at the moment America needs more electricity generation, the country’s infrastructure developers are cancelling projects at an alarming rate.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been analyzing data to see how many power projects have been cancelled this year. In our latest report, we found that 1,891 power projects with a combined 266 GW of generation capacity have been cancelled in 2025—equivalent to roughly one-quarter of America’s entire current electricity generation capacity.
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Brian Allen: TWENTY-THREE DEAD: Inside the Torture, Neglect, and Silence of ICE Detention

There are numbers that a government can hide behind and numbers that break through the wall of official language. Twenty-three is the latter. Twenty-three people have died in immigration detention this year under the Trump administration, a total that eclipses previous years and forces a painful question into the national conversation. Who were these people, and what happened inside the walls of a system that operates with almost no public visibility?

Two names rise to the surface first because their stories refuse to stay buried. They belong to men who entered the custody of the United States alive and left it dead. …
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Members of Congress reviewing Ge’s case discovered that he had been found with both his hands and both his feet tied behind his back. They were told that a man with his limbs bound in this way had somehow managed to kill himself. There was no plausible method for such an act. …

The second name is Randall Esquivel. He did not die inside an ICE facility. He died because ICE deported him while he was in a vegetative state. Esquivel became gravely ill in custody. Advocates say his medical decline was rapid and preventable. Instead of transferring him to a hospital equipped to care for him, ICE placed him on a deportation flight. …
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BBC: New US security strategy aligns with Russia’s vision, Moscow says

Russia has welcomed US President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy, calling it “largely consistent” with Moscow’s vision.

The 33-page document, unveiled by the US administration this week, suggests Europe is facing “civilisational erasure” and does not cast Russia as a threat to the US.

Combatting foreign influence, ending mass migration, and rejecting the EU’s perceived practice of “censorship” are mentioned as other priorities in the report.

Several EU officials and analysts had pushed back on the strategy, questioning its focus on freedom of expression and likening it to language used by the Kremlin.
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Steven Beschloss: Do You Support the Global Expansion of Democracy?

A Saturday Prompt

In less than a month, it will be 2026, the 250th anniversary year of our nation’s founding and the beginning of an extraordinary democratic experiment. Given the anti-democratic regime controlling our White House, it’s going to be quite a year filled with cognitive dissonance.

That became even more obvious with the release yesterday of the 33-page “National Security Strategy,” which seeks to set out the foreign policy agenda and guiding principles of this second Trump term. In this brief prompt, I won’t explore the document in detail, but note some of the overarching worldview, including its hostility to “the trajectory” of Europe and its assertion that the European continent is facing “civilizational erasure” because of the flow of immigrants and the failures of its leaders.

It goes on to suggest the revival of Europe’s “former greatness” means supporting nationalism and far-right “patriotic” European parties, which would include, for example, Alternative for Germany (AfD), an extremist neo-Nazi party.
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Lisa Needham: A war criminal without a war

It’s just murder.
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It’s tempting to say that Hegseth is a war criminal committing an ongoing series of war crimes, with the killing of survivors being especially horrific. But as George Will — not exactly a liberal anti-war type — put it, he “seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.”
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CNN: Survivors clinging to capsized boat didn’t radio for backup, admiral overseeing double-tap strike tells lawmakers

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