Nearly 1,000 ‘Worker Over Billionaire’ Actions Planned for Labor Day in US

   

Care workers protest proposed cuts to Medicaid in Washington DC on 23 June 2025. (photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty)

Rallies from Alaska to Hawaii will highlight cuts to wages, unions and social safety nets under Trump policies

 Michael Sainato The Guardian

Nearly 1,000 “worker over billionaire” protests are being planned in all 50 states starting this weekend as part of a Labor Day week of action organized by labor unions and advocacy groups in opposition to the Trump administration’s policies.

The actions include marches and rallies in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, a Labor Day parade in New York City, rallies in Palmer, Alaska, Freeport, Maine, and a planned protest at the state capitol in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The protests are organized by the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, and dozens of partner organizations, including Public Citizen, Indivisible, Democracy Forward, MoveOn and Patriotic Millionaires.

“This is about organic, grassroots organizing, and we intentionally wanted it to be outside of Washington DC, because that’s where the impacts are being felt,” Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, said.

“Whether it’s teachers or nurses or construction workers, they’re all determined to stand up and fight back, because they’re experiencing the cuts, they’re experiencing the change in policies, they’re experiencing the attacks of this White House on their unions, and so they’re determined to make their voices heard and mobilize to fight forward regardless of what’s happening around us, no matter the obstacles.”

Among the policies being protested are the Trump administration’s attempts to rescind collective bargaining rights from 1 million federal workers, the largest single act of union busting in US history, a cut to minimum wage requirements for federal contractors from $17.75 an hour to $13.30 an hour, a proposed rule to eliminate federal minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million childcare and home care workers, and the rescission of a minimum wage requirement for disabled workers.

The actions come as public support for labor unions remains strong. A national poll conducted by the AFL-CIO and David Binder Research found trust in labor unions is at 55% – larger than the 36% of respondents who said they trusted the Democratic party and the 35% of respondents who said they trusted the Republican party.

“People are waking up to the fact we don’t have to just sit back and take it and the labor movement is the place to go to channel that activism, to build what’s next and we’re putting forward a vision for what the economy can be,” added Shuler.

“When people see tanks rolling into Washington DC, when we were promised lower costs, they’re like, this makes no sense,” said Shuler. “We’re getting billionaires standing up at the front row of the inauguration, basically taking over agencies, our economy and our country. So I think that no matter what party you belong to, that is a unifying thing that everybody wants, the freedom, fairness and security that all working people deserve.”

“The billionaire agenda, the corruption we’re seeing, is changing the way government is functioning. It’s leading to real-time and impactful ramifications for regular people,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “The gutting of Medicaid, all the firings we’ve seen of federal workers, the ravaging of families through Ice raids. It’s just all coming together to cause people to stand up and say, ‘we are the people of this country. It is workers over billionaires.’”

Gilbert noted they currently have 984 events scheduled, with the aim to reach over 1,000 by Labor Day, a mass organizing effort that has been weeks in the making.

“We’ve been standing together over and over again to talk about the authoritarian slide that this administration is ushering in in our country. We expect a lot of energy this weekend. This is really just the beginning of an ongoing fight against what’s being taken away from regular people,” she said.

EVIL: GOP just can't stomach a taste of its own map-rigging medicine

House Speaker Mike Johnson, left, and National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson.

Decries Newsom's attempt to counter naked Texas power grab 

by Emily Singer

Daily Kos Staff

Sunday, August 24, 2025 at 1:00:05p MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions.

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Multiple GOP lawmakers this week accused California Democrats of corruptly trying to redraw their state’s congressional districts, even though the Golden State is moving to redraw its maps only to counter the naked power grab Republicans pulled off in Texas with their mid-decade gerrymander.

House Speaker Mike Johnson—who supported the Texas redraw that could boot as many as five Democratic House members—said California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s planned redraw is "a slap in the face to Californians who overwhelmingly support the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."

"Gavin Newsom should spend less time trampling his state’s laws for a blatant power grab, and more time working to change the disastrous, far-left policies that are destroying California," Johnson wrote.

Funny, you could say basically the same thing about Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who was more focused on rigging the midterms for Republicans and his dear leader, President Donald Trump, than helping his state recover from devastating flooding that killed dozens of people.

Other House Republican leaders also slammed California’s redraw while ignoring Texas’.

Texas state Sen. Juan Hinojosa, right, looks at a protester dressed as death standing outside of the House Chamber where Democratic Texas state Rep. Nicole Collier refuses to leave due to a required law enforcement escort on Aug. 19.

“The NRCC is prepared to fight this illegal power grab in the courts and at the ballot box to stop Newsom in his tracks,” National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson said in a statement, accusing Newsom of “disenfranchising voters to prop up his Presidential ambitions.”

But when he was asked earlier in August about Texas’ gerrymander, Hudson demurred.

“Well, it’s up to the states. I mean, I have nothing to do with it. I found out about it when you all wrote about it,” Hudson told reporters, adding later that he was “not “concerned” about California’s redraw. 

“Some of the states, they can do what they want to do,” Hudson said—before it was clear just how serious California was about countering Texas’ power grab.

Other Republicans cooked up their own criteria to claim that Democrats gerrymander more often than Republicans do, when the opposite is true.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who comes from the state that fired the first shot in this latest redistricting war, also slammed California without taking a look in the mirror.

"Newsom & Obama are lying and they are hypocrites," Cruz wrote in a post on X. "The most egregious gerrymanders in the country are virtually ALL Democrat."

Cruz then made up a metric he thought would prove his point, asking Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok to "Examine states with six or more congressional seats. Compile a list of the five most egregious gerrymanders, defined as the biggest delta between the percentage of the congressional delegation a party wins & the percentage that party wins statewide."

"Which party is it?" Cruz asked Grok.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, shown in 2022.

But Grok's response showed that Republican-run states also have gerrymanders that are "egregious" based on Cruz's metric, including Tennessee and Wisconsin. Not to mention, Cruz limiting the list to states with six or more districts leaves out a number of Republican-run states that heavily gerrymander their seats, including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah, and Iowa, among others.

Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley, whose House seat would be nuked if California voters allow the state to redraw its congressional map, also made the rounds on cable news shows to whine.

"When elections are fair, Republicans win. That's why we should end gerrymandering and establish Voter ID nationwide. And it's why Newsom is trying to permanently rig our elections by making himself Gerrymanderer-in-Chief," Kiley said.

Of course, Democrats would love to end gerrymandering nationwide. It's why it was in the first bill House Democrats introduced in 2019 after they took back control of the House in the 2018 midterms. Not a single Republican voted for the bill, and the GOP controlled Senate never brought it up for a vote.

Republican Rep. Ken Calvert, who would also be drawn out of his House seat in the California plan, also complained about California's redistricting effort without complaining about what Texas did first.

"There is zero transparency as Sacramento Democrats scheme to eliminate the power of the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission," Calvert moaned.

At the end of the day, Republicans are merely getting a taste of their own medicine in the redistricting wars. And it looks like they don't like it.

NEWSOM'S PARODIES: MAGA World Is So Close to Getting It...

   

Gavin Newsom’s parodies are riling people up—and they don’t quite seem to understand why. (photo: Sean Rayford/Getty)

...that a politician should not conduct himself in public like a dim, insufferable child.

Tom Nichols / The Atlantic

Aug 24 2025 

 

The Fox News commentator Dana Perino has finally had enough. “You have to stop it with the Twitter thing,” she told the chief executive. “I don’t know where his wife is,” she fumed. “If I were his wife, I would say, ’You are making a fool of yourself! Stop it!’” She went on to note that he has a big job, and that he has to be “a little more serious.”

What a relief to see someone from Fox, the flagship MAGA network, getting completely fed up with juvenile social-media behavior from a national politician. Except the chief executive in this case was not Donald Trump, the president of the United States, but Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.

Newsom has taken to trolling Trump on social media by imitating his bizarre rants, odd capitalizations, and affection for exclamation points. He has also posted several memes that are on-the-nose parodies of things Trump has fed to his followers for years.  

Politico recently summarized some of Newsom’s activities on social media:

There’s Newsom on Mount Rushmore. There’s Newsom getting prayed over by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and an angelic, winged Hulk Hogan. There’s Newsom posting in all caps, saying his mid-cycle redistricting proposal has led “MANY” people to call him “GAVIN CHRISTOPHER ’COLUMBUS’ NEWSOM (BECAUSE OF THE MAPS!). THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

Newsom got even closer to Trumpian perfection with a post yesterday that is almost impossible to tell apart from an actual outburst from the president:

WHAT IS WRONG WITH CRACKER BARREL?? KEEP YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOGO!!! THE NEW ONE LOOKS LIKE CHEAP VELVEETA “CHEESE” FROM WALMART, THE PLACE FOR “GROCERIES” (AN OLD FASHIONED TERM)!!!

Some of these jibes are clumsy, but many are well crafted and even funny, despite the unsettling fact that the person whom the governor is parodying is the commander in chief.

And the proof that Newsom is onto something is that his supporters are reacting with genuine rage. Perhaps Newsom has hit a nerve because satire is always more effective than name-calling. 

Mango Mussolini or Cheeto Jesus (both of which refer to the president’s unusual bronzed skin tone) appeal only to Trump’s opponents. But a post that perfectly mimics Trump’s antics is a mirror—one that prompts people to consider how Trump looks to everyone else in the world.

At the least, Newsom has scored a direct hit on the double standard both in the national press and among the public that excuses Trump’s deeply concerning behavior as merely part of Trump’s shtick, some facet of his personality that cannot be held to account.

Too many reporters have resorted to sane-washing Trump, forcing his bizarre statements somehow to make sense by cherry-picking the occasional phrase or sentence related to policy while ignoring his kooky rants about sharks and his Stalinist threats against his political enemies.

Newsom’s parodies sidestep all the hand-wringing criticism about how presidents should act: Instead they show, rather than explain, what it should feel like when anyone but Trump acts the way Trump acts.

Perino is just one of many who is in high dudgeon. And Newsom responded to Perino with a dead-on Trump-like response: “DANA ’DING DONG’ PERINO (NEVER HEARD OF HER UNTIL TODAY!)”

Vice President J. D. Vance has lashed out at Newsom, telling Fox that the Californian’s attacks aren’t landing, because his trolling “ignores the fundamental genius of President Trump’s political success, which is that he’s authentic”; in other words, everyone knows that Newsom’s crackpot hijinks are fake but Trump’s are real—a rather odd defense.

And of course, the MAGA posters on social media and Facebook have flown off the handle with rage. (Newsom is having a “mental breakdown,” said one MAGA influencer, without a trace of irony.) As it turns out, the people who pioneered the slogan “Fuck your feelings” are impossibly delicate souls.

Others have adopted a pose of criticizing Newsom more in sorrow than anger. “I’m all for appreciating crass humor,” said Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer and MAGA social-media stalwart who is now assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Trump Justice Department. “I love South Park. It’s hilarious.” (One wonders if she’s been watching the show recently.) “But don’t just be a loser copying the most powerful person in the world’s style.”

Trump’s majordomo at Fox, Sean Hannity, summed up this New Seriousness among the president’s supporters when he tut-tutted Newsom’s “performative confrontational style,” adding that “maybe it wins you points with the loony radical base in your party,” but it won’t win elections.

How refreshing: Fox commentators and leading figures in the Trump administration all agreeing that a politician should not conduct himself in public like a dim, insufferable child.

They’re all so close to getting it.

I admit that I am conflicted about Newsom’s approach. Some years ago, I wrote that Trump’s opponents, especially the ones addicted to terms such as Drumpf, the Orange Menace, Cadet Bone Spurs, and others needed to act like adults, and convey the gravity of their concerns about Trump instead of treating him like either an inconsequential boob or a towering werewolf whose name must not be invoked. The same goes for the too-online liberals who refer to “Rethuglicans” and “RepubliKKKans”—uncomfortably similar to the media-addicted right-wingers who use infantile slams such as DemonRats and Killary.

One aspect of Newsom’s parodies have genuinely made me laugh: his posting of pictures done in the style of the artist and Trump admirer Jon McNaughton, who is a competent illustrator but whose paintings are strange. They’re a kind of hallucinatory mash-up of Grant Wood and medieval iconography, in which Trump carries the world like Atlas, or is blessed by dead presidents, or rescues the Constitution from glowering liberals. (The Newsom image with the deceased Hulk Hogan was so perfectly rendered that at first I thought it was created by McNaughton himself.) Trump supporters seem to love these pictures. Newsom has shown just how weird they are.

Newsom has made his point and should move on. But his lasting accomplishment has been to reveal that Trump’s supporters are not as impervious to reality as the president’s opponents might believe.

I suspect—as I have since the day Trump announced his first run for president a decade ago—that the MAGA faithful are hypersensitive to criticisms of Trump because, in their hearts, many of them know. They know that many of Trump’s statements are offensive and alarmingly detached from reality. They know that Trump has a disordered personality. They know that the president is a daily embarrassment to his party and to his nation.

For years, these MAGA partisans have employed various tactics to prevent the imminent pain of cognitive dissonance. They resort to “what about” arguments aimed at other politicians; they claim that Trump actually knows what he’s doing or that they understand the message underneath all the broken thoughts, garbled words, and dead-end sentences.

Now Newsom is forcing them to see what Trump looks like without the distorting force field created by Trump’s showmanship and his aggressive delivery of incoherent statements.

Come to think of it, maybe MAGA world isn’t close to getting it; maybe they do get it, and maybe that’s why, this time, they’re especially angry.

Newsom's paodies of the clown show are striking a collective MAGA nerve.

 

Best way to score a job with Trump? Be a racist internet troll.

President Donald Trump gives his best "poor me" WTF gesture as he speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One in Pennsylvania on Aug. 3.

"Foursome from hell" latest to ride Donnie's Clown bus - and the joke is on us

 

by Lisa Needham

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday, August 19, 2025 at 6:01:04p MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Did you hear about the guy who had a racist and conspiracy-ridden online life before joining the Trump administration? No, not that guy. The other guy. No, the other, other one.

You’re forgiven for being confused about which Trump administration hire we’re talking about, given that Monday saw two separate stories break about their repulsive online presences. 

From the news outlet NOTUS, let’s learn all about Eric Lendrum, a speechwriter for the Department of Homeland Security. Before Lendrum apparently started penning propaganda for Secretary Kristi Noem, he had a rich, grievance-filled online life. NOTUS unearthed a December 2021 piece attributed to Lendrum where he moped extravagantly about Trump supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and how:

American conservatives are, right now, on course for being every bit as ostracized and alienated from broader society as Jews were in the years leading up to Nazi Germany. Children are actively indoctrinated in our education system to turn against their own parents, Soviet-style, if they feel their parents’ views are outdated or backwards.

Buddy, your kid having to learn about the mere existence of transgender people or perhaps that slavery was less than great is not the same as being rounded up and put in camps, but sure. 

What Lendrum really grooves on, like so much of this administration, is watching people in pain from Trump’s actions. Hence, his incredibly low-rated podcast lovingly dwelling on how much he loved watching members of Congress running for their lives while his cult leader’s followers overran the seat of American government. So fun! He also had the obligatory endorsement of the racist “great replacement theory”—which claims there is an ongoing effort to use immigration to “replace” white Americans—and equated asylum-seekers with “scum.” 

When asked for comment by The Independent, DHS shared a link to the First Amendment. Huh. Neat that they occasionally remembered that it exists, what with the Trump administration regularly trying to jail and deport students for the content of their speech. 

Also on Monday, Wired reported about a now-deleted Twitter account linked to E.J. Antoni, whom Trump nominated to cook the books at the Bureau of Labor Statistics ever since the job numbers made him sad. It was already known that Antoni was also an insurrection enthusiast.

The deleted account that Wired uncovered is a neatly comprehensive list of conservative fixations: COVID-19 denialism, hating Black Lives Matter, retweeting conspiracy crank Jack Posobiec—you get the picture. Also neat: joshing about how cool it would be to drop a nuclear bomb on China if conspiracy nuts “determined” China “created” COVID:

Antoni’s social media presence was wide-ranging. Think of a renaissance man if “renaissance” means “spewing Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, misogyny about Kamala Harris, and violent rhetoric about the 2020 election”:

Of course, both of these accounts fit right in with other high-level Trump administration employees. Perhaps Lendrum and Antoni can get together with Paul Ingrassia, whom Trump nominated to run the Office of Special Counsel after a rich career as a far-right podcaster and fanboy of white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Heck, call Darren Beattie—expelled for being too racist for the first Trump administration but now running the U.S. Institute of Peace—and make it the foursome from hell. 

Trump's despicable appointees continue to do their business on America.

"DISGUSTING": Trump shows the world that war crimes pay

   

Collage of Putin and Trump walking on a red carpet amid the corpses of civilians killed by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha in 2022. Shared by Bucha’s mayor Anatolii Fedoruk in response to the Putin-Trump meeting

Putin left Alaska knowing genocide is rewarded. Every dictator was watching.  

 

Euromaidan

Fedoruk in response to the Putin-Trump meeting 

17 August 25 

Disgusting.

That’s the word watching American soldiers drop to their knees, unrolling a red carpet for the man who killed Ukrainian children yesterday and will kill more tomorrow.

While Putin posed for photos in Alaska, Ukrainian parents were pulling their kids from rubble.

While he grinned in Trump’s limousine, Ukrainian mothers were digging graves.

While an Orthodox bishop exchanged gifts with a war criminal, 19,000 stolen Ukrainian children remained in Russian camps.

What really happened Friday: America told the world that genocide pays. War crimes get you red carpet treatment. Russia’s Foreign Minister showed up wearing a USSR sweatshirt. Russian state media served “chicken Kyiv” on Putin’s plane while actual Kyiv burns nightly from Russia’s drones.

The message was clear: We own you now.

The truth Trump abandoned

Putin didn’t just get legitimacy in Alaska; he got proof that the West has abandoned truth itself.

Genocide became “diplomacy.”

War crimes became “peace talks.”

Child killers become “partners.”

Here are the truths they’ve abandoned:

Truth 1: Peoples have the right to exist. They call this a “territorial dispute” when Russian officials openly admit genocidal intent.

Putin isn’t after land—he’s after eliminating Ukraine itself. But reality doesn’t bend to political convenience. Our right to exist isn’t negotiable.

This is bigger than Ukraine. Russia is fighting against existence itself—the principle that different peoples should exist, should grow, should contribute their own gifts to the world. Every time a people is erased, the world becomes smaller, darker, less human.

While America rolled out the red carpet for our destroyer, Ukraine stood up for the right of all peoples to flourish in this world. Because when the powerful are allowed to erase the weak, you’ve destroyed the only thing standing between civilization and chaos.

Once might makes right, there’s always someone mightier.

Truth 2: Truth and justice make civilizations great, not strongmen. Trump thinks Putin is powerful. He said Russian troops “retreated” from Kyiv because they got stuck in the mud, not because Ukrainians stood and fought.  He looks past Zelenskyy, thinking Ukraine doesn’t have the cards.

But he has it backwards.

Ukraine’s strength doesn’t come from tanks. It comes from standing for truth and justice—the very foundations that once made the West great.

Trump promised to “Make America Great Again.” He could have done exactly that by supporting the nation fighting for the very things that make America great. Instead, he chose a perpetrator of genocide.

Truth 3: Unconfronted evil grows. Politicians say: “This war needs to end, it’s cost thousands of lives.”

The lie is that giving Putin what he wants will make him stop. It won’t.

Putin didn’t stop after Georgia or Crimea, and he won’t stop after Donetsk. Evil doesn’t get satisfied when fed. It gets hungrier.

The choice before us

This is the West’s war being fought with Ukrainian blood. Putin isn’t just trying to erase Ukraine—he’s testing whether democratic civilization will defend itself. Friday gave him his answer.

The West can abandon Ukraine today and face Putin’s tanks in Warsaw tomorrow. America can sell us out now and watch its own children conscripted later.

What must happen now

Friday was America’s test. America failed.

But Ukrainians are still fighting. Still dying for the principles democratic civilization claims to believe in. Still holding the line that Western leaders are too weak to defend.

The West has one chance left:

• Send every weapon Ukraine needs. Now.
• Freeze every Russian asset. Today.
• Cut every pipeline, every bank, every trade deal that feeds Russian aggression.

Ukraine still fights for existence itself. The only question is whether the West will fight for its own.

If what we witnessed in Alaska isn't enough to arouse every American to stand up and be counted, then shame on us.  If you as an individual are not personally involved in this battle, then shame on you.

Hurry, Hurry, Hurry! It’s Trump’s Great Ukraine Giveaway. Bargains Galore, if Your Name Is Putin

 

  President Trump, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Will the Donald pull out his infamous Sharpie and carve out a chunk of Ukraine for his best bud?

Marina Hyde / Guardian UK

13 august 25

Good to have it confirmed that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will be talking about Ukraine behind its back on Friday in Alaska, as the US president rambled through a press conference on Monday in which he explained that Putin “wasn’t going to mess with me” and that Ukraine was going to have to accept new borders. 

And listen – you’ll agree that territorial pronouncements mean so much more coming from a guy whose staff once shamelessly redrew a hurricane impact map to stop him looking stoopid. It’s a true honour for the Ukrainians to see their country effectively carved up by someone who would prefer to post-rationalise any old crap with a Sharpie than admit he doesn’t have the first clue about it and cares even less.

Leave it to the tasteful visionary behind the Gaza Riviera to categorise what he’s doing as trying to get back some of Ukraine’s “oceanfront property”. “In real estate we call it oceanfront property,” Trump said on Monday, demystifying this term of high art for non-developers who haven’t contrived to bankrupt several Atlantic City casinos. “That’s always the most valuable property.” Thanks, Mister Mogul! It is assumed that the stretch of high-end primo coastline Trump was referring to included Mariupol, the utterly ruined port in which many thousands of civilians perished during the Russian siege. In international law we call it a possible war crime; in real estate we call it … what? Strategic pre-construction? Spa-chitecture?

Certainly, how we put things is a matter of concern to this supremely sensitive president, who can find words very hurty, particularly when allied to optional concepts such as truth or the law. 

“I was a little bothered by the fact Zelenskyy was saying, ‘I have to get constitutional approval,’” he whined on Monday of the Ukrainian leader’s desire to put any peace deal to the Ukrainian people via a referendum. “He’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody?” Again, whether Ukraine “go[ing] into war” is a fair categorisation of its being invaded by Russia is not something that bothers the Sharpie king of the White House.

As for the precise nature of the forthcoming cartography, Trump spent quite a lot of time talking suspiciously nebulously about “land swapping”. Can you swap things on behalf of someone who doesn’t want to swap them, and without them being present at the table? If so, I would like someone to swap me one of Trump’s second-tier golf courses, and would expect him to be very relaxed about it. He’ll just have to take my word that it’s in the wider interests of everybody.

In terms of what he deems to be the interests of interested parties, there has been some strong suggestion in recent days that the Trump administration thinks it would be a win for Ukraine to abandon the bits of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that are not even occupied by Russia, with only a ceasefire and the promise of some future better deal to show for it. Which would certainly be the absolute wrongest reading of a land deal since the New York Tribune called the Alaska purchase a folly and a waste of money.

In fact, it would explain Putin’s willingness to travel to that very territory to hold Friday’s peace talks instead of doing it on neutral turf – you can probably afford to concede on the meeting location if everything else is likely to be such a complete gift to you. The Russian president might even bring along another hideously flattering portrait of Trump as an ice-breaking present, having already commissioned one as a personal gift earlier this year, which was passed on to Trump via his special envoy Steve Witkoff. Witkoff said it was a “beautiful portrait” and that the president was “clearly touched by it”.

And so to the buildup to Friday. We’ll have to see how excited Trump gets about the chance to join some sort of German-organised conference call with European leaders on Wednesday. For the US president, the negotiating table is a place that seats only two people, one of which should always be him. 

For Putin, many fear through bitter experience, the negotiating table is a place where you simply obfuscate and buy time to regroup before renewing aggression. Rather like Holly Golightly at the window of Tiffany’s, nothing very bad can happen to Putin in Alaska. Merely turning up avoids the threatened sanctions. 

If, as seems likely, Trump decides he should be appeased with some land, any Ukrainian refusal to rubber-stamp this would leave him frustrated with and lashing out at Zelenskyy, not Putin. (Give the orange guy his peace deal and then his peace prize, dammit! He’s getting bored out here.) And if a ceasefire is somehow agreed, it would surely, on the form book, be regarded by Putin merely as a strategic buying of time. The Russian leader is obsessed with Ukraine in a way the Trump administration seems incapable of, or indifferent to, grasping.

Look, maybe geopolitics really will turn out to be just a simpler version of commercial real estate. Maybe someone who has lost almost as many fortunes as he has gained in that particular trade really will turn out to be a maverick master whose refresh-the-parts traditional diplomacy can’t reach. 

Maybe! But the sheer lack of jeopardy for Putin in Alaska feels far more significant than the mood music. The best-case scenario is that Europe and Ukraine prepare themselves for the artlessness of the deal. 

The worst-case scenario is a darker pathway altogether – and one we seem increasingly likely to stumble on to.

Poor Kristi Noem doesn't like 'South Park' highlighting her awfulness

A still from Wednesday night's episode of "South Park" depicts Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as she pulls her firearm to shoot a service dog in the audience of a live "Dora the Explorer" stage show.

Trump bootlicker incredulously says president would never make fun of how women look

 

By Emily Singer 

Daily Kos Staff

Monday, August 11, 2025 at 10:30:08a MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY: 

Blue Country Gazette Blog 

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is trying to play the victim after the satirical animated show "South Park" mercilessly mocked her on Wednesday night’s episode.

"It’s so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look. It’s only the liberals and the extremists who do that," Noem told right-wing podcaster Glenn Beck on Thursday night, referring to how “South Park” made fun of her obviously Botox- and filler-filled face. "If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly, they can’t. They just pick something petty like that."

Of course, the show made fun of more than just Noem's looks. It also ridiculed her cringeworthy cosplaying, the fact that she shot and killed her own puppy, and that she's one of the biggest cheerleaders for President Donald Trump's evil immigration plan. 

But more than that, Noem claiming that only "liberals" make fun of how women look is insane, given that she works for Trump, the king of making crude and disgusting comments about how women look.

Over the years, he’s made fun of pop icon Cher's plastic surgery, called actor Bette Midler "ugly," said Angelina Jolie is "not a beauty," said Rosie O'Donnell has a "fat, ugly face," and accused MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski of "bleeding badly from a face-lift," just to name a few.

In 2018, The New York Times published an article laying out some of the other times Trump made fun of women's appearances: 

Mr. Trump has accused women of having “fat, ugly” faces and of repelling voters because of their looks. He called one woman a “crazed, crying lowlife” and said another was a “dog” who had the “face of a pig.” He said Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a 2015 presidential debate was “too disgusting” to talk about. He has repeatedly mocked women for being overweight.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, he also made fun of then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly for having “blood coming out of her wherever." (Kelly now debases herself daily to lick Dear Leader's boots because she can make more money in the right-wing grift-o-sphere by doing that.)

But leave it to Noem to play the victim amid authentic criticism of her horrific behavior.

“Imagine working for Donald Trump and saying ‘it’s only the liberals’ who make fun of women’s looks,” journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in a post on X. “They have no shame whatsoever.”

New York governor ramps up fight with Texas gerrymandering 'renegades'

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul

As we all must, Gov. Hochul takes a stand

By Walter Einenkel 

Daily Kos Staff 

August 08, 2025 at 2:00:11p MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul held a press conference Monday to respond to ongoing GOP efforts to disproportionately increase Republican representation in Congress. She discussed potential Democratic strategies to combat Texas’ gerrymandering scam, including redrawing New York state’s congressional maps to offset the loss of Democratic seats.  

"If that's what's called for, I will put saving democracy as my top priority at any cost, because it is under siege,” Hochul told reporters. “Just like those who put on a uniform to fight in battles across the ages. For centuries we've stood up and fought. Blood has been shed. This is our moment in 2025 to stand up for all that we hold dear and not let it be destroyed by a bunch of renegades in a place called Texas.”

Hochul joins Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has also pledged to counter Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s machinations to sabotage democracy by redrawing California’s congressional maps.

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Related | California Democrats have a new plan to combat GOP in the next election

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Texas Democrats have been preparing for this fight. On Sunday, most Democratic state legislators left the state, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass any legislation. Texas Democratic state Rep. James Talarico accused the GOP of “trying to rig the midterm elections right before our eyes.”

Abbott has since threatened to replace Democratic representatives and charge them with “bribery.” 

Join Gov. Hochul - stand up to Trump.

Trump Destroys Our Source of Information About Jobs. This Is Beyond Irresponsible.

 

He hates facts. He rejects truth. He doesn’t want the public to know what’s really happening. 

 

Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Substack

 

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)

05 August 25

Sorry to intrude again on your day, but this is urgent.

I spent much of the 1990s as secretary of labor. One unit of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.

So what does Trump do? In one fell swoop on Friday he essentially destroyed the credibility of the BLS.

Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May.

Well, that’s too bad. Revisions in monthly jobs reports are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time, which it often does.

Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else — presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.

How can anyone in the future trust the information that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot.

Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily important source of information.

When Trump doesn’t like the message, he shoots the messenger and replaces them with someone who will come up with messages he approves of. So we’re left without credible sources of information about what is really occurring.

Trump is in the process of trying to do the same with the Federal Reserve — demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates. Trump is even threatening Powell with a Trumped-up expose of Powell’s supposed extravagance in refurbishing the Fed as a means of forcing Powell to do his bidding or resign.

What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell gives in to Trump? It evaporates.

In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is fighting inflation as rigorously as it should. And without that confidence, longer-term interest rates will spike, because investors will assume that there’s no inflation cop on the beat and therefore will demand a higher risk premium.

Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that climate change isn’t a “hoax,” as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency.

It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of indigenous people.

He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and disease and how we can guard against them.

This is a man and a regime that doesn’t want the public to know the truth. He is turning America into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.

The Trumping of America is happening so fast and in so many places that it’s hard to see the whole. Which partly explains why he doesn’t want the facts out. He doesn’t want us to know how bad it really is.

Help spread the truth. Help organize and mobilize against this calamity.

Will Trump one day adorn Ghislaine's neck with the medal of honor?  If she agrees to cover for him, you can bet on it.

OF COURSE: Ghislaine Moved to Minimum-Security Prison After Questioning by former Trump lawyer

  

Ghislaine Maxwell exercising on the track inside FCI Tallahassee, where she is currently serving twenty years for for her role in the sex trafficking ring operated by Jeffrey Epstein. (photo: Matt Symons/MEGA)

SURPRISE: Epstein associate and co-sex offender transferred to cushy digs after promising who knows what.

Alan Feuer / The New York Times

 02 August 25

 

ALSO SEE: Ghislaine Maxwell Moved to a Lower-Security Prison in Texas

Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein now serving a 20-year prison sentence for sexually exploiting and abusing teenage girls, has been moved from a federal prison in Florida to minimum-security prison camp in Texas, her lawyer said on Friday.

The move, which was reported earlier by The New York Sun, came about a week after Ms. Maxwell was interviewed over two days about the Epstein case by Todd Blanche, the No. 2 official in the Justice Department and one of President Trump’s former lawyers.

Ms. Maxwell’s lawyer, David O. Markus, declined to comment on the reason for the move.

According to Bureau of Prison regulations, inmates designated as sex offenders are generally supposed to be held in low-security prisons, like the facility in Tallahassee, Fla., where Ms. Maxwell had been previously held, not in minimum-security facilities, like her new prison camp in Bryan, Texas.

Mr. Blanche met with Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Markus last Thursday and Friday amid a firestorm of criticism from Trump supporters who have called for the administration to release all federal files related to Mr. Epstein.

Before entering government service, several top aides to Mr. Trump, including the F.B.I. director Kash Patel, had led the president’s followers to believe that there were secrets lurking in the Epstein files about a cabal of powerful men implicated in Mr. Epstein’s sex crimes. Many of those followers were outraged after the Justice Department released an unsigned letter last month saying there would be no further disclosures about the case.

The letter was issued about two months after top officials at the Justice Department informed Mr. Trump that he himself was mentioned in the files, according to several people with knowledge of the exchange. A person’s name appearing in the documents is not necessarily an indication of wrongdoing.

Mr. Markus has said that during Ms. Maxwell’s interview with Mr. Blanche, she answered questions about 100 people. It remains unclear whether those people were victims of Mr. Epstein, his associates or other people implicated in her own sex-trafficking case.

Ms. Maxwell has made it clear that she would like a pardon or for her sentence to be thrown out or reduced. Mr. Trump has not indicated what he intends to do but has told reporters that he is legally allowed to pardon Ms. Maxwell.

Two women who have accused Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell of abusing them, Maria and Annie Farmer, and the family members of another, Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide this spring, reacted angrily to the news of Ms. Maxwell’s relocation.

“It is with horror and outrage that we object to the preferential treatment convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has received,” they said in a statement on Friday. “Ghislaine Maxwell is a sexual predator who physically assaulted minor children on multiple occasions, and she should never be shown any leniency.”

“President Trump has sent a clear message today: Pedophiles deserve preferential treatment and their victims do not matter,” the statement said.

The Gruesome Foursome: Donnie, Melania, Jeffrey and Ghislaine.