Dear Everybody:
First, in the special elections yesterday:
--Democrat Mary Robichaux won the race for mayor of Roswell, Georgia in a major upset.
--The Republican won in Tennessee, but only by 9 points in what had previously been a 22 point district, and only after the Republicans spent $8 million dollars defending the seat.
--Lincoln Project: "The GOP can spin last night all they want as a ‘win,’ but a 13-point shift to the democrats in a plus-22 district is making them shit enough bricks to rebuild the East Wing.
--Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told Republicans in a closed-door meeting that he expects Republicans not only to retain the majority in 2026 but expand it. One GOP Rep said, "And I believed I was going to date the prom queen."
But the big news continues to be the boat strikes:
--Pete Hegseth changed his story AGAIN--a couple of times:
--He had bragged that he watched the whole thing on video, but now he says he wasn’t even there. He saw the first strike and then had to go do other stuff because the head of the Pentagon is really busy, you know: "I watch that first strike live. At the Department of War we got a lot of things to do, so I not stick around...couple of hours later I learned that commander had made...the decision...we have his back." (Sure.)
--He also told reporters he hadn’t been consulted in advance on the strike and claimed he hadn’t been fully briefed.
--Then he said he was there and saw it, but he couldn’t see it because of "the fog of war." Hegseth: "I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war. This iswhat you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices and plant fake stories in the Washington Post. (Note: Pete Hegseth was in the air-conditioned Pentagon while he was watching it.)
--MuellerSheWrote summed it up: "We didn’t hit it twice. We did hit it twice and that’s legal. The Admiral did it. We didn’t see them. I’m in the fog of war and you’re not, even though I am right where you are."
--The White House said, "Well, yes, he did order the second strike, but not to kill people, just to disable the boat." (Their earlier story was that the two guys were clinging to pieces of wreckage in the water, so it doesn’t sound like there was a boat left to disable.)
--The Washington Post is now reporting that the second strike was ordered WHEN the two survivors were detected.
--Bill Kristol: "That’s how a man who lectures actual soldiers about ‘warfighting’ makes himself feel big: ordering the long-range killings of defenseless civilians and watching it on video. And Hegseth’s ruling reaction has amounted to acting like a huge weenie..."
--The Guardian is reporting that Pete Hegseth told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement. He is quoted in his own book saying this in his own words.
--NBC is reporting that the top military lawyer for the command overseeing the strikes and the members of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel thought they were illegal. He warned they could be considered extrajudicial killings.
--There has been a furious backlash at the Pentagon. One Pentagon official said angrily, "This is ‘protect Pete’ bullshit."
--According to Charlie Sykes, "some of Hegseth’s top civilian staff appeared deeply alarmed about the revelations and were contemplating whether to leave the administration."
--A Department of Defense official says Hegseth was "the target engage authority," the key figure who authorized the strike, whether he was there or now.
--This thing is so bad that Newsmax’s legal analyst said Hegseth and everyone involved should be "prosecuted for a war crime."
--Conservative George Will: "Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal without a war. An interesting achievement. The killing of survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself."
--WW2VetsAnti-Fascism: "The worst part about the boat strikes, regardless of who ordered what and besides the ultimate tragedy of lives lost, is they’re forever a stain on the dignity of the US military. That’s why the military has the right to refuse illegal orders. Illegal orders could ruin the military."
--Kelly: "Hegseth is a 12-year-old playing army."
--Fox’s Brit Hume did his best to cover for Hegseth: "Eliminating the survivors would be a big problem if that’s what it was all about. If they were killed in the course of the rest of the boat being destroyed, if it was sufficiently intact caused military personnel to think the job had not been finished, that’s another matter."
--Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance: "The military has a strong tradition of truth telling in the most difficult circumstances. So information about who issued the order, why no one stopped it from being carried out despite the clear guidance in the DOD’s law of war manual, and so forth, is all coming out. It’s only a matter of time."
--Meanwhile, Hegseth has another problem. The report on Signalgate from the Pentagon’s IG investigation has been sent to Congress and is expected to be released within coming days.
The other big news is that Trump held a press conference/cabinet meeting and slept through the entire thing:
--He repeatedly dozed off and slumped farther and farther down in his chair till during Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s speech, he was out like a light.
--Several people commented that the only times he woke up was when he heard his own name mentioned.
--Palmer Report: "Donald Trump held a press conference yesterday, if you can call it holding a meeting when you sleep through most of it. Trump’s eyes were closed the majority of the time. When he was awake, things arguably went even worse for him. At one point, Trump got so confused about a reporter’s question, he asked the reporter to ‘use fewer words.’" Palmer Reports said he called affordability a hoax and thanked Colombia for sending cocaine.
--Chris D. Jackson: "Trump falls asleep during a meeting on live TV. If Joe Biden had done this, the media would’ve turned it into a week-long crisis."
--John (repeat 1918) Buss: "I’m not sure, but that Cabinet meeting may have been the most entertaining one yet. Two hours of Trump fighting off sleep, like the toddler he obviously is, while his minions heaped praise upon his barely coherent body."
--Middle Age Riot; "Wake up, asshole. If I don’t get to sleep through your Presidency, you don’t."
--His cabinet took turns praising him and trying to outdo each other in saying how much they adored Dear Leader:
--Lee Zeldin: "I’m grateful this holiday season for you."
--Howard Lutnick: "The greatest cabinet ever for the greatest President ever...I can’t be more proud of how you did it, sir. You created the greatest cabinet. It’s a joy to be at this table."
--Kristi Noem: "You’ve saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean." (There are only 300 million people in the whole country.)
--Also Kristi Noem: "Next year we’re gonna make sure we only put people in leadership positions in this country that love this country." (Good idea. I totally agree.)
--ALSO Kristi Noem: "Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane. You kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that...it’s been an honor to work for you. You are a great American..."
--Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy: "Don’t wear pajamas or slippers on the plane."
Palmer Report is definitely right about the meeting going better for Trump when he was asleep:
--Trump: "There’s this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about--affordability. They just say the word, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. The word affordability is a con job by the Democrats." (Note: On November 29 he posted: ‘I AM THEAFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT. TALK LOUDLY AND PROUDLY!"
--Trump: "I should get the Nobel Prize."
--Trump: "I give the right answers. There’s never a scandal. There’s never a problem."
--He thanked Colombia for sending cocaine.
--He accused Honduras of altering their election results.
--Trump: "What they do is they take the fiber optics and they take fiber, try to hook it into copper. And fiber and copper don’t mix. You can’t do it...you saw that by the helicopter crash. You saw that into the plane."
--Trump: "I don’t care if you had a fourth world country. You know, we allowed third world country in and we would allow fourth World War countries in also."
--Trump, talking about JD Vance and Tim Walz: "I think the man’s a grossly incompetent man. I thought that from the day I watched JD destroy him in a debate. I was saying, ‘Who was more incompetent? That man or my man? I had a man and he had a man--they were both incompetent. I had a man and a woman. I thought she was very incompetent, too. But now she’s leading the field and I think she’s leading the field in the nomination." (The entire time he was saying this garbled stuff, he was glowering at JD Vance, so, yes, he was talking about him.)
--At the end of the press conference, Trump gave a long, defensive rant on his health, insisting that his health was "excellent."
--And there hasn’t been a single word on that "big announcement" Trump promised to make at 2 p.m. yesterday. (Did he forget all about it, or were they afraid to let him make it after his performance at the cabinet meeting?)
Trump keeps pardoning people:
--Trump keeps pardoning people who all seem to either 1) pay him tons of money or 2) who he identifies with because they’re sexual offenders. He is completely bypassing the normal procedures for pardons, which in the past have involved a panel who determine whether the person is deserving and whether they have admitted guilt and have expressed remorse for their crimes.
--The most recent atrocity was the former president-and-drug-dealer of Honduras who has had people murdered, but he’s also pardoned some you may have missed:
--George Santos
--Chris Collins, NY--insider trading
--Duncan Hunter, CA--campaign corruption
--Steve Stockman, TX--campaign corruption
--Rick Renzi, AZ--corruption
--Robin Hayes, NC--lying to the FBI
--Mark Siljander, MI--obstruction, lying
--Duke Cunningham, CA--bribery
--Michael Grimm, NY--tax evasion
--John Rowland, CT--corruption
--He refuses to rule out pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell.
--Dem Senator Chris Murphy: :An essential feature of authoritarianism is that the leader, not the courts, decides who is guilty and who is not."
In ICE/Gestapo news:
--ICE used a Sabrina Carpenter song as background for a violent video showing ICE agents taking people into custody "the hard way." They didn’t get permission to use it. (They never do.)
--Sabrina Carpenter was furious. She issued the following statement: "This video is evil and disgusting. Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda."
--The White House’s OFFICIAL response was: "Here’s a Short and Sweet message for Sabrina Carpenter. We won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminals, illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from out country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?"
--A White House official then explained: "We do it on purpose ‘in order to trigger a negative response from famous liberals and provide further amplification of their pervasive culture war."
--(Note: I’m not sure it’s a good idea to talk about dangerous criminals, illegal murderers, rapists and pedophiles when Trump is involved.)
In resistance news:
--The police chief of Minneapolis said his force will NOT cooperate with ICE.
--GOP state senator in Indiana, Michael Bohacek, has a daughter with Downs Syndrome. He is refusing to vote for redistricting in Indiana because Trump called Governor Pritzker "retarded." --Another Indiana state senator is voting against the redistricting because MAGA threatened her with pipe-bombing her house after she said she was against the bill.
In other news:
--The Pentagon now is demanding that Senator Mark Kelly’s pension be stopped in a "downshift" from demanding he be court-martialed.
--The other day in the House, a Democratic representative called Trump a felon, and the chair immediately leaped in and said, "Point of order. You may not call the President of the United States a felon." (Note: In point of fact, the President of the United States IS a felon. He was convicted on 34 counts of fraud.)
--Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have just received new stuff from the Epstein files. They include never-before-seen photos of Epstein’s home on the island. I didn’t think they were particularly damning, though Epstein had more towels than your usual hotel.
In good news:
--A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a provision in Trump’s Big Beautiful budget law that defunded Planned Parenthood.
--GOP House Reps are going to use discharge petitions to force legislation on stopping stock trading for representatives and on putting sanctions on Russia, both things Trump and Mike Johnson are dead set against.
--Scientists have created a synthetic bacterium that degrades and assimilates PET, the most commonly used plastic.
In great news:
--There’s a new Randy Rainbow video out, called "RFK!" and set to--of course--"Cabaret!" You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDHpbnbmaME
Best comment of the day, from Tom Nichols in THE ATLANTIC: "Posting stupid memes after being accused of murder is not the response of a patriot who must answer to the public about the security of the United states and its people in uniform. It is not the response of a secretary of defense who values the advice of the officers who report to him. It is not the response of a human being who comprehends the risks--and the costs--of ordering other people to kill helpless men clinging to the wreckage of a boat. It is instead the response of a sneering, spoiled punk who has been caught doing wrong and is now daring the local fuzz to take him in and risk the anger of his rick dad--a role fulfilled by Donald Trump in this case."
As P.G. Wodehouse said, "Christmas has us by the throat again." And in honor of the holiday season, I’m going to be including some holiday stuff, too, both political and non-political. For today, you might want to look at the gingerbread house Melania put up in the White House. It’s OF the White House, and not only is it possibly the worst gingerbread house ever made, but isn’t it a bad idea to do the White House when part of it is lying in rubble? You can see it here: https://www.google.com/search?q=white+house+gingerbread+house+2025&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=8dfe9edb86176f37&sxsrf=AE3TifNa7Pk9xPpYQJHWmal6devsYJpmAw
Keep calm and carry on,
Connie Willis