![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fanmix_monthly
Dec. 21st, 2025 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matsushima posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_community_promo
fanmix_monthly is a new fanmix community on Dreamwidth! Posting is now open. Optional prompts will start in January 2026.
Dec. 21st, 2025 10:17 am
matsushima posting in dw_community_promofanmix_monthly is a new fanmix community on Dreamwidth! Posting is now open. Optional prompts will start in January 2026.
Why Republican scandals and misdeeds get a pass
Dec. 21st, 2025 12:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
dailykos_feedPresident Donald Trump has been neck-deep in a series of scandals and outrages that would have ended the career of a Democratic commander in chief, or at minimum caused them a lot of political heartache.
For instance: Trump has gone on extend racist rants about Somalian immigrants like Rep. Ilhan Omar, tried to pardon a conspiracy theorist for state violations where he has no jurisdiction, demolished portions of the White House, and used the tragic murder of director Rob Reiner to advance his petty political grievances.
The mainstream media has treated all of these developments with kid gloves, making them at best one-day stories or mere blips on the media radar. Contrast this to onetime Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s singular scream that effectively ended his campaign in 2004 (Trump regularly screams at anyone within earshot) or the days and days of negative press former President Joe Biden received when he finally ended the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.
Related | Trump screams at America that everything is fine
To be sure, Trump has the benefit of a Republican establishment that backs him no matter how grave the embarrassment or outrage—House Speaker Mike Johnson always conveniently seems to have missed the latest news—but the press is perfectly capable of harping on stories that involve Democrats. That scrutiny just doesn't apply to Rrpublicans—especially Trump.
Why does this happen, and with such regularity? The mainstream media has an institutional bias towards both-sidesism, which is the notion that the Democratic and Republican parties and the related liberal and conservative movements engage in outrages at the same pace. This simply isn’t true by any objective measure.
Leading Democratic figures like former Presidents Obama and Biden or congressional leaders like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer don’t operate at the same volume as figures like Trump and other MAGA-brand Republicans.
In all his time as a public figure, Obama never praised Nazis or argued that climate change is a Chinese hoax.
But it isn’t just an internal media problem.
The right has spent over six decades consistently and relentlessly going after the media, in what writer Eric Alterman dubbed “working the refs.” The notion is that by relentlessly putting the press on defense with allegations of bias, the right has preemptively pushed the mainstream press to bend over backward to disprove the right’s most dishonest and specious arguments.
After decades of this behavior the mainstream media consistently rolls over for the right—but conservatives never let up in their attacks. It’s never good enough, so even though former President George W. Bush referred to a member of the press as a “major league asshole” in 2000, Trump is still whining about the “fake news” in 2025.
Another reason the right’s scandals and outrages don’t linger is the lack of an outrage machine on the left that compares to the pearl-clutching energy on the right. Conservative leaders have message discipline and a disconnect from reality that allows them to make specious attacks on Democrats relentlessly.
These attacks are then regurgitated by right-wing media like Fox News, which turns national tragedies like the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi into a long-form narrative about Democratic incompetence, pulling in figures like Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who conveniently was preparing to run for president).
Yet in spite of these media failures, not everything can be ginned up to favor the right. Media complicity and weakness can only go so far, because everyday Americans have to live their day-to-day lives navigating the mess that Republicans so often create for them.
No amount of spin can turn back the effect of a cratering economy or a war claiming the lives of thousands.
Related | Seriously? The Trump-Kennedy Center?
Republican media domination falters in the face of voter anger, over and over. We’ve seen this in elections rebuking GOP failures in 2018, 2020, and now in 2025.
And we are likely to see it again in the near future, because there’s only so much abuse and gaslighting that people can take before they reset the terms of the debate.
Guns marketed for personal safety fuel public health crisis in Black communities
Dec. 20th, 2025 10:00 pmdailykos_feedBy Fred Clasen-Kelly and Daniel Chang for KFF
Leon Harris, 35, is intimately familiar with the devastation guns can inflict. Robbers shot him in the back nearly two decades ago, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. The bullet remains lodged in his spine.
“When you get shot,” he said, “you stop thinking about the future.”
He is anchored by his wife and child and faith. He once wanted to work as a forklift driver but has built a stable career in information technology. He finds camaraderie with other gunshot survivors and in advocacy.
Still, trauma remains lodged in his daily life. As gun violence surged in the shadows of the COVID pandemic, it shook Harris’ fragile sense of security. He moved his family out of Philadelphia to a leafy suburb in Delaware. But a nagging fear of crime persists.
Now he is thinking about buying a gun.
Harris is one of tens of thousands of Americans killed or injured each year by gun violence, a public health crisis that escalated in the pandemic and churns a new victim into a hospital emergency room every half hour.
Over the past two decades, the firearm industry has ramped up production and stepped up sales campaigns through social media influencers, conference presentations, and promotions. An industry trade group acknowledged that its traditional customer was “pale, male and stale” and in recent years began targeting Black people and other communities of color who are disproportionately victimized by gun violence.
Related | It's my machine gun, and I want it now
The Trump administration has moved to reduce federal oversight of gun businesses, heralding a new era announced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as “marked by transparency, accountability, and partnership with the firearms industry.”
The pain of gun violence crosses political, cultural, and geographic divides — but no group has suffered as much as Black people, such as Harris. They were nearly 14 times as likely to die by gun homicide than white people in 2021, researchers said, citing federal data. Black men and boys are 6% of the population but more than half of homicide victims.
Washington has offered little relief: Guns remain one of few consumer products the federal government does not regulate for health and safety.
“The politics of guns in the U.S. are so out of whack with proper priorities that should focus on health and safety and most fundamental rights to live,” said attorney Jon Lowy, founder of Global Action on Gun Violence, who helped represent Mexico in an unsuccessful lawsuit against Smith & Wesson and other gunmakers that reached the Supreme Court. “The U.S. allows and enables gun industry practices that would be totally unacceptable anywhere else in the world.”
KFF Health News undertook an examination of gun violence during the pandemic, a period when firearm deaths reached an all-time high. Reporters reviewed academic research, congressional reports, and hospital data and interviewed dozens of gun violence and public health experts, gun owners, and victims or their relatives.
The examination found that while public officials imposed restrictions intended to prevent COVID’s spread, politicians and regulators helped fuel gun sales — and another public health crisis.
As state and local governments shut down schools, advised residents to stay home, and closed gyms, theaters, malls, and other businesses to stop COVID’s spread, President Donald Trump kept gun stores open, deeming them essential businesses critical to the functioning of society.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not respond to interview requests or answer questions about the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce regulation of the firearm industry.
During the pandemic, the federal government gave firearm businesses and groups more than $150 million in financial assistance through the Paycheck Protection Program, even as some businesses reported brisk sales, according to an analysis from Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group.
Federal officials said the program would keep people employed, but millions of dollars went to firearm companies that did not say whether it would save any jobs, the report said.
About 1 in 5 American households bought a gun during the first two years of the pandemic, including millions of first-time buyers, according to survey data from NORC at the University of Chicago.
Harris is keenly aware of what drives the demand.
“Guns aren’t going away unless we get to the root of people’s fears,” he said.
Surveys show most Americans who own a gun feel it makes them safer. But public health data suggests that owning a gun doubles the risk of homicide and triples chances of suicide in a home.
“There’s no evidence that guns provide an increase in protection,” said Kelly Drane, research director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “We have been told a fundamental lie.”
Record Deaths
Less than a year into the pandemic, 20-year-old Jacquez Anlage was shot dead in a Jacksonville, Florida, apartment. Five years later, the killing remains unsolved.
His mother, Crystal Anlage, said she fell to her knees and wailed in grief on her lawn when police delivered the news.
She said Jacquez overcame years in the foster care system — living in 36 homes — before she and her husband, Matt, adopted him at age 16.
Jacquez Anlage had just moved into his own apartment when he was shot. He loved animals and wanted to become a veterinary technician. He was kind and loving, Crystal Anlage said, with the 6-foot-4, 215-pound physique of the football and basketball player he’d been.
“He was just getting to a point in life where he felt safe,” Crystal Anlage said.
Gun violence researchers say parents like Crystal Anlage carry trauma that destroys their sense of security.
Anlage said she endures post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. She is terrified of guns and fireworks.
But she has made something meaningful of her son’s killing: She co-founded the Jacksonville Survivors Foundation, which works to raise awareness about the impact of homicide and to support grieving parents.
“Jacquez’s death can’t be in vain,” she said. “I want his legacy to be love.”
His legacy and that of other young men killed by guns is muted by firearm manufacturers’ powerful message of fear.
Related | Why conservatives love guns so much
During the pandemic, gun marketers told Americans they needed firearms to defend themselves against criminals, protesters, unreliable cops, and racial and political unrest, according to a petition filed by gun control advocacy groups with the Federal Trade Commission.
In a since-deleted June 18, 2020, Instagram post from Lone Wolf Arms, an Idaho-based manufacturer, a protester is depicted being confronted by police officers in riot gear between the words “Defund Police? Defend Yourself,” the petition shows. The caption says, “10% to 25% off demo guns and complete pistols.”
Impact Arms, an online gun seller, posted a picture on Instagram on Aug. 3, 2020, showing a person putting a rifle in a backpack, the document says. “The world is pretty crazy right now,” the caption reads. “Not a bad idea to pack something more efficient than a handgun.”
The National Rifle Association in 2020 posted on YouTube a four-minute video of a Black woman holding a rifle and telling viewers they need a gun in the pandemic. “You might be stockpiling up on food right now to get through this current crisis,” she said, “but if you aren’t preparing to defend your property when everything goes wrong, you’re really just stockpiling for somebody else.”
The messaging worked. Background checks for firearm sales soared 60% from 2019 to 2020, the year the federal government declared a public health emergency.
The same year, more than 45,000 Americans died from firearm violence, the highest number up till then. In 2021, the record was broken again.
Weapons sold at the beginning of the pandemic were more likely to wind up at crime scenes within a year than in any previous period, according to a report by Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, citing ATF data.
Gun manufacturers “used disturbing sales tactics” following mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, “while failing to take even basic steps to monitor the violence and destruction their products have unleashed,” according to a separate memo released by congressional Democrats in July 2022 following a House Oversight and Reform Committee investigation of industry practices and profits.
The firearm industry has marketed “to white supremacist and extremist organizations for years, playing on fears of government repression against gun owners and fomenting racial tensions,” the House investigation said. “The increase in racially motivated violence has also led to rising rates of gun ownership among Black Americans, allowing the industry to profit from both white supremacists and their targets.”
In 2024, then-President Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior provided a $215,000 grant to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a leading firearm industry trade group, to help companies market guns to Black Americans.
The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for protecting consumers from deceptive and unfair business practices and has the power to take enforcement action. It issued warnings to companies that made unsubstantiated claims their products could prevent or treat COVID, for instance.
But when families of gun violence victims, lawmakers, and advocacy groups asked the FTC in 2022, during Biden’s term, to investigate how firearms were marketed to children, people of color, and groups that espouse white supremacy, officials did not announce any public action.
This summer, the National Shooting Sports Foundation pressed its case to the FTC and derided “a coordinated ‘lawfare’ campaign” that it said gun control groups have waged against “constitutionally-protected firearm advertising.”
FTC spokesperson Mitchell Katz declined to comment, saying in an email that the agency does not acknowledge or deny the existence of investigations.
Serena Viswanathan, who retired as an FTC associate director in June, told KFF Health News that the agency lost at least a quarter of the staff in its advertising practices division after Trump came into office in January.
Gun companies Smith & Wesson, Lone Wolf Arms, and Impact Arms did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the National Shooting Sports Foundation or the NRA.
In an August 2022 social media post, Smith & Wesson President and CEO Mark Smith said gun manufacturers were being wrongly blamed by some politicians for the pandemic surge in violence, saying cities experiencing violent crime had “promoted irresponsible, soft-on-crime policies that often treat criminals as victims and victims as criminals.”
He added, “Some now seek to prohibit firearm manufacturers and supporters of the 2nd Amendment from advertising products in a manner designed to remind law-abiding citizens that they have a Constitutional right to bear arms in defense of themselves and their families.”
Guns and Race
In 2015, the National Shooting Sports Foundation gathered supporters at a conference in Savannah, Georgia, and urged the firearm industry to diversify its customer base, according to a YouTube video and reports from Everytown for Gun Safety and the Violence Policy Center.
Competitive shooter Chris Cheng gave a presentation called “Diversity: The Next Big Opportunity.” Screenshots from the conference include slides purporting to show “demographics,” “psychographics,” and “technographics” of Black and Hispanic shooters.
The slides described Black shooters as “expressive and confident socially, in a crowd” and “less likely to be married and to be a college grad.” They said Hispanic shooters were “much more trusting of advertising and celebrities.”
Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, said industry marketing shifted in the latter half of the 20th century as the popularity of hunting declined. The new sales pitch: guns for personal safety.
“They said, ‘We need to break into new markets,’” Suplina said. “They identified women and people of color. They didn’t have a lot of success until the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the death of George Floyd. The marketing says, ‘You deserve the Second Amendment too.’ They are selling the product as an antidote to fear and anxiety.”
Gun manufacturers were harshly criticized in the Oversight Committee’s 2022 investigation for marketing products to people of color, as gun violence remains a leading cause of death for young Black and Latino men.
At the same time, some companies also promoted assault rifles to white supremacist groups who believe a race war is imminent, the investigation found. One company sold an AK-47-style rifle called the “Big Igloo Aloha,” a reference to an anti-government movement, it said.
Still, Philip Smith wants more Black people to get guns for protection.
Smith said he was working as a human resources consultant a decade ago when he got the idea to form the National African American Gun Association, which helped the National Shooting Sports Foundation compile its report on communicating with Black consumers.
Smith encourages Black people to buy firearms for self-defense and get proper training on how to use them.
After 10 years, Smith said, his group has about 45,000 members nationwide. Single members pay $39 a year and couples $59, which gives them access to discounts from the organization’s corporate partners, including gunmakers, and raffles for gun giveaways, according to its website.
The police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin helped spark early interest from doctors, lawyers, and others in joining the group, he said. But interest took off during the pandemic, he said, even among Democrats who had resisted the idea of owning a gun.
“Hundreds of people called me and said, ‘I don’t agree with anything you’re saying, but what kind of gun should I buy,’” Smith recalled.
Smith, describing himself as “quiet, nerdy, and Afrocentric,” said criticism of guns misses the point.
“My ancestors bled for us to have this right,” he said. “Are there some racist white people? Yes. But we should buy guns because there is a need. No one is forcing us to buy guns.”
‘American Amnesia’
During the pandemic, gun violence took its greatest toll on racially segregated neighborhoods in places such as Philadelphia, where roughly 1 in 4 residents live in poverty.
A city report says a one-year period in the pandemic saw more than 2,300 shootings, or about six a day. Many of the cases haven’t been solved by police.
City officials cited the boom in gun sales in the report: Fewer than 400,000 sales took place in Pennsylvania in 2000, but in 2020 it was more than 1 million.
Gun sales have dropped since the pandemic ended, but the harm they’ve caused persists.
At a conference last year inside the Eagles’ football stadium, victims of firearm violence or their relatives joined activists to share accounts of near-death experiences and the grief of losing loved ones.
Paintings flanked the stage and the meeting space to commemorate people who had been fatally shot, nearly all young people of color, under messages such as “You are loved and missed forever” and “Those we love never leave.”
Marion Wilson, a community activist, said he believes the nation has forgotten the suffering Philadelphia and other cities endured during the pandemic.
“We suffer from the disease of American amnesia,” he said.
Harris was on his way home from a job at Burlington Coat Factory nearly two decades ago when robbers followed him from a bus stop and demanded money. He said he had none and was shot.
Harris had spent his early life fixing cars with his grandfather, when he wasn’t at school or attending church. He remembers lying in a hospital bed, overcome with a sense of helplessness.
“I had to learn to feed myself again,” he said. “I was like a baby. I had to learn to sit up so I could use a wheelchair. The only way I got through it was my faith in God.”
Harris endured years of rehabilitation and counseling for PTSD. As someone in a wheelchair, he said, he sometimes fears for his safety — and a gun may be one of the few ways to protect himself and his family.
“I’m mulling it over,” Harris said. “I’m afraid of my trauma hurting someone else. That’s the only reason I haven’t gotten one yet.”
Social Murder
Dec. 20th, 2025 08:45 pmatrios_feedMusk's actions with USAID have inspired some appropriate commentary, but generally it is not acknowledged that bad policy decisions will kill people and that the people making those decisions are therefore murderers.
Intel Readies Multi-Queue Support For Linux 7.0 As New Feature For Crescent Island
Dec. 20th, 2025 03:25 pmphoronix_feedIn addition to this week's drm-intel-next pull request to DRM-Next adding Nova Lake display support, a drm-xe-next pull request was also sent out on Friday that prepares a new multi-queue feature for Xe3P_XPC -- initially just the "Crescent Island" AI inference accelerator card. Plus other new features too for this Xe kernel driver in the upcoming Linux 7.0~6.20 kernel version...
Trump team goes full-on Big Brother, and immigration attorneys get the boot
Dec. 20th, 2025 08:00 pmdailykos_feedInjustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
This week, we’ve got bad judges of all different stripes. Judge Aileen Cannon is back and as terrible as ever. The Trump team and GOP senators are forcing a terrible judicial nominee on Tennessee because they can’t force him on Georgia, where he actually lives. And the administration is firing immigration law judges to make way for something worse.
Aileen Cannon continues her SCOTUS audition
You’d think Cannon wouldn’t have to prove herself, what with having done President Donald Trump so many solids during the classified documents case and all.
Why, she gummed that thing up good and strong with a combination of incoherent rulings and slow-walking, but she really went above and beyond. She helpfully invented a new rule about how special counsels are extremely illegal so that she could throw out the case and protect Trump, which is clearly what she sees as her actual job.
And even though the charges are gone, Cannon’s zeal to ensure that Trump never faces the least bit of consequences has in no way diminished. You see, there’s still the matter of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the investigations into Trump’s myriad crimes. Special counsels have to file a report at the end of their cases, and—barring some reason of, say, national security—those become public.
But we can’t have that, now can we? Cannon has been stonewalling on this for nearly a year. In January, she barred the Department of Justice from releasing the report until a federal appeals court resolved whether its release would prejudice Trump’s onetime codefendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. But the DOJ dismissed their cases months ago, so that excuse won’t work anymore. Nevertheless, Cannon persisted—as did her injunction.
In February, American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute filed motions seeking to intervene in the case and to lift the injunction, but Cannon has refused to rule on the motions. This has gone on so long that the groups were forced to go to the 11th Circuit in early November to ask them to make Cannon rule. The court agreed that there had been undue delay and gave Cannon 60 days to rule before it would consider stepping in.
Those 60 days have nearly run out, and Cannon has still refused to rule. But she did rouse herself to swiftly grant Trump’s Dec. 2 motion to be allowed to participate in the case—even though he is not a party—so he could register his opposition to the report being made public.
You can expect this to be the reason that Cannon will blow through the 11th Circuit’s deadline. Typically, you’d assume that a federal district court judge wouldn’t want to get jammed up with openly defying the federal appellate court, but Cannon knows they’re not her boss—Trump is. And anything to keep the boss happy, right?
Fake elector scheme, real trial
Trump has been handing out fake pardons left and right to try to take care of his election-denier homies who got jammed up with state charges.
The problem for the people who were foolish enough to invent the fake elector scheme or become fake electors is that they are prosecuted in real state courts, where Trump’s pardons don’t reach.
Enjoy your upcoming trial in Wisconsin state court, James Troupis and Michael Roman! Troupis and Roman weren’t fake electors themselves. Instead, Troupis is a former Trump 2020 campaign attorney, and Roman was a campaign aide. But Wisconsin was ground zero for the fake elector idea, and Troupis and Roman played a major role in its execution.
Both Troupis and Roman have been trying to get their indictments tossed, but to no avail. Wow, so weird that a judge wouldn’t buy the argument from Troupis’ lawyer that fake electors signing elector ballots isn’t forgery because they were signing the actual type of ballot true electors would use.
Troupis better hope his attorney has less ridiculous arguments at trial, because that one sucks.
Is it bad when the government starts keeping an attorney watchlist?
Even as a general principle, this seems bad. A government watchlist doesn’t typically lead to good things. But when we’re talking about this government and this watchlist? It’s extra bad.
An immigration attorney discovered an ICE watchlist with her name on it, squirreled away deep in the agency’s website, along with multiple other immigration attorneys—most of whom seemed to be people of color.
Given that the administration issued a memo saying that immigration attorneys are “unscrupulous” and has moved to sanction attorneys for representing immigrants pro bono, it’s pretty clear that this wasn’t a DHS holiday card list.
The list is, of course, gone now. An immigration advocacy group has filed a Freedom of Information Act request, but let’s be honest—we will never ever learn anything more about this. There’s also no way that the administration is going to stop making these lists.
Just stuff those judicial nominees wherever they fit
These days, we are all aware that Trump is very sad about the practice of blue slips, where senators have the courtesy of approving—or not—U.S. attorney nominees for their home states. That practice has robbed us of Lindsey Halligan and Alina Habba. What a loss.
But blue slips are also for judicial nominees, which is a problem for Trump because it means that, when he tries to put forward one of his more unhinged judicial nominations in a blue state, those senators aren’t going to agree. So the administration has a new plan: Just move the nominees around and stuff them in red states.
That’s what’s happening with Brian Lea, who has been tapped for a lifetime appointment in the Western District of Tennessee. But despite the White House referring to him as “Brian Charles Lea, of Tennessee,” and GOP Sen. Bill Hagerty calling Lea a “fourth-generation Memphian,” and saying he will be “an outstanding judge for the people of West Tennessee,” Lea does not actually have any connections to the state.
Yes, he was born there, but the whole of his practice career has been in Georgia, save for the time he trundled up to the nation’s capital to clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas. He was only admitted to the Tennessee state bar this year, presumably after starting his quest to land a judgeship. And he just got admitted to practice in the Western District of Tennessee, which means he’s seeking a judgeship in a district where he’s never appeared.
All his bar memberships and other professional affiliations are in Georgia, and he was up for a seat on the Georgia Court of Appeals.
In other words, he lives in Georgia and practices in Georgia, but Georgia has two Democratic senators, so Trump would run into the blue slip wall there. But the pliant GOP senators in Tennessee have no problem joining the fiction that Lea has deep ties to the state.
So Lea gets a lifetime appointment, and the people of Tennessee get to pound sand.
Article I judges purged to make way for nativist deportation freaks instead
The administration is continuing to purge immigration law judges, who—despite the name—are not really federal judges and are not part of the judicial branch. Rather, they are employees of the executive branch—Article I—and therefore don’t have lifetime appointments.
And even though immigration law judges are not exactly known for their extreme kindness toward immigrants, many of them are still not terrible enough for this administration.
That’s why they’re being shoved out the door in favor of “deportation judges” to “make decisions with generational consequences,” which is really just a roundabout way of saying “only racists can apply.”
Can’t wait to see how much they’ll have to dumb down job requirements to get enough people for this.
What is the lawyer version of the ICE doofuses who were so scared of protesters with snowballs that they called the sheriff’s office for backup and then managed to pepper spray each other?
More watercolors
Dec. 20th, 2025 02:45 pmyomikomaCatching DW up on my watercolor adventures - see https://suberic.net/~dmm/graphics/watercolor/watercolor.html and https://suberic.net/~dmm/graphics/unotarot/unotarot.html for more details.
( Cut for size: a street scene and an uno/tarot card. )
( Cut for size: a street scene and an uno/tarot card. )
Arch Linux's Main NVIDIA Driver Packages Now Using The Open Kernel Modules
Dec. 20th, 2025 02:08 pmphoronix_feedWith the Arch Linux packages for the NVIDIA official graphics driver moving to the now-stable NVIDIA 590 driver series that drops the GeForce GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series GPU support, Arch Linux users with those old Maxwell and Pascal graphics cards will need to transition to using the NVIDIA legacy driver packages from the Arch Linux AUR. Meanwhile for those on Turing and newer with the NVIDIA 590 driver will enjoy the open-source kernel modules by default being used...
A new report describes deep environmental cuts, state by state
Dec. 20th, 2025 07:00 pmdailykos_feedNorth Carolina topped the Environmental Integrity Project’s list for both personnel and program cuts, though a restructuring makes exact comparisons difficult. Still, one researcher said staff there is “being asked to do far more with far less.”
By Lisa Sorg for Inside Climate News
Fewer inspections, weaker enforcement and less oversight: Deep cuts to state budgets and at the Environmental Protection Agency are preventing regulators from fully protecting the public from pollution, according to a report released today by the Environmental Integrity Project.
The financial crisis at these agencies is occurring amid the expansion of the fossil fuel, plastics and petrochemical industries, said EIP Executive Director Jen Duggan.
When states have fewer resources, Duggan said, “those protections, those rights that every American has under our environmental laws, are not being realized.”
President Trump’s budget proposal would decimate 2026 spending at the EPA by 55 percent, or $4.2 billion, according to the report. House Republicans are recommending cutting it by a quarter, while the Senate Appropriations Committee voted for a reduction of just 5 percent.
If enacted, these reductions would exacerbate the EPA’s financial plight. Over the last 15 years, the agency’s budget has been slashed by 40 percent, Duggan said, and its workforce by 18 percent. Since Trump began his second term, more than 3,000 EPA workers have retired or have been terminated as part of the administration’s gutting of the agency.
The upshot of these cuts is that states have to pick up the slack, which is central to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s vision for the agency. In March, on the day he announced “the biggest deregulatory action in history,” Zeldin said he intended to “give power back to the states.”
However, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating most EPA grants to the states, undercutting their agencies’ ability to wield that power.
Texas lawmakers have cut by a third the budget for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality over the last decade, accounting for inflation, the EIP report says. The agency has also struggled to retain employees; 30 percent of its workforce has less than two years of experience, and half have less than five years.
Kathryn Guerra worked for nearly four years at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, where she helped small businesses and local governments comply with regulations. Most recently, Guerra worked in the EPA Region 6 office overseeing environmental justice efforts, which the Trump administration eliminated this year.
She’s now the TCEQ campaign director for Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy group.
The funding cuts to TCEQ described in the report “render the agency largely ineffective,” Guerra said, “and cuts to the EPA will worsen that ineffectiveness.”
According to TCEQ’s biennial report to the Texas legislature, it takes an average of 351 days to process one enforcement case. The agency’s most recent enforcement report shows a backlog of 1,400 enforcement cases, Guerra said.
“Ultimately it means communities don’t get relief from the environmental harms those polluters are causing,” she said.
States with the deepest budget cuts to environmental agencies from 2010–2024, according to the report, are:
- Mississippi—71 percent
- South Dakota—61 percent
- Alabama—49 percent
- Texas—33 percent
- Montana—32 percent
North Carolina is among the states whose budgets have contracted in the past 15 years. While the EIP report said the state Department of Environmental Quality’s budget had declined 32 percent from 2010-2014, an agency restructuring in 2015 makes quantifying the depth of the reductions difficult.
“These cuts have real impacts on the people of our state,” said Drew Ball, director of Southeast Campaigns for the Natural Resources Defense Council, on a press call about the report.
Ball also serves as a Buncombe County Commissioner in an area wrecked by Hurricane Helene in 2024.
“When a family in eastern North Carolina notices their tap water turning cloudy after a heavy rain, there are fewer staff who can investigate,” he went on. “There are fewer inspectors available to respond when hurricanes send flood waters through low lying areas, mixing industrial pollution, animal waste and storm water, the staff responsible for tracking and responding to those threats are being asked to do far more with far less.”
During the 2008 recession, North Carolina lawmakers cut DEQ’s budget, part of a statewide belt-tightening. However, the Republican-led legislature has not fully restored those reductions in more economically robust times and during an era of increased population growth.
From 2020 to 2024, census data show the state’s population has grown by more than 5 percent. But over the same period, when accounting for inflation, DEQ’s budget decreased.
In 2019, the DEQ budget was $97.4 million, according to state documents, equivalent to $123.7 million today.
The 2023 DEQ budget totalled $108.7 million, or $115.8 million in today’s money. That’s a 6 percent decrease compared with four years earlier.
Some of the agency’s functions rely on permitting fees. In at least one instance, a healthier environment has resulted in unexpected financial consequences. As state and federal regulations have made the air cleaner, Title V facilities, the largest air pollution sources, have decreased their emissions, according to a 2023 DEQ report to the legislature.
This has translated to a drop in “billable tons”—54 percent over a decade—that generate a portion of the agency’s revenue. Yet the state’s 300 Title V facilities still must be inspected and their permits renewed, even as the number of staff has decreased by 19 percent.
In 2024, the legislature increased the permit fee to help close the gap.
North Carolina had the largest staffing cuts at environmental agencies from 2010 to 2024, according to the report, though the same caveat related to the 2015 restructuring applies.
States with the next largest staffing cuts, 2010-2024, are:
- Connecticut—26 percent
- Arizona—25 percent
- Louisiana—24 percent
- Missouri and Kansas—20 percent
Adding to the budgetary crisis, it’s also been difficult for North Carolina DEQ to retain or hire employees. At its peak three years ago, the agency had vacancy rates that exceeded 20 percent. DEQ officials said at the time that agency wages, whose boundaries are set by the legislature, can’t compete with the private sector.
“Many families today live with waste in roadside ditches, wells that are too contaminated to drink from and constant fear about what the next storm will carry into their yards,” Ball said. “Yet the very agency responsible for protecting these families is facing a growing burden, with shrinking staff, shrinking budgets and shrinking political support, and now the federal government is proposing the deepest cuts to EPA in 40 years. That’s a recipe for disaster in states like ours.”
Redactions
Dec. 20th, 2025 06:30 pmatrios_feedIf we make the reasonable assumption that every redacted nonvictim image in the Epstein files is a person too powerful/too close to power to have their identity revealed, what does that say?
There are a lot of redactions.
David Brooks not long ago.
I know a thing or two about the American elite, ahem, and if you’ve read my work, you may be sick of my assaults on the educated elites for being insular, self-indulgent and smug. But the phrase “the Epstein class” is inaccurate, unfair and irresponsible. Say what you will about our financial, educational, nonprofit and political elites, but they are not mass rapists.
Even if we accept that his personal appearance in the Epstein files is as innocent as such a thing can be - which is not as innocent as everyone wants us to believe - running interference for his pals is not.
Clips of the week: Trump yells at America, and new GOP head-scratchers
Dec. 20th, 2025 06:00 pmdailykos_feedPresident Donald Trump turned up the volume this week in an effort to force through his delusional view of the state of the country. Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s continued failure to offer any meaningful policy or solution to rising health care costs continues to weigh down its 2026 prospects like a two-ton boulder tied to a pool noodle.
And it’s all on video!
Trump screams at America that everything is fine
Frequently yelling,Trump addressed the nation, telling Americans that their experiences of the current economy were wrong, and that actually it was the “hottest” country in the world. However, hours after he spoke, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the costs of groceries remain stubbornly high under Trump’s watch.
Nation's dumbest senator is back with a new head-scratcher
During a gaggle with reporters, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma tried to defend the Trump administration’s barring all of Congress from reviewing unedited footage related to the administration’s possible war crimes off the coast of South America. Mullin, arguably our dumbest senator, claimed giving Congress access to it could result in leaks.
Thanks, Obamacare! Mike Johnson gets humiliated—again
The House will be voting on a three-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, after four House Republicans defied Speaker Mike Johnson and joined Democrats to force a vote on a bill to extend expanded ACA tax credits for three years.
LOL! Tomi Lahren is preaching restraint and decorum now.
Right-wing media personality Tomi Lahren appeared on Fox News to discuss Erika Kirk’s private meeting with podcaster Candace Owens, who has been promoting outrageous conspiracy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Republicans have nothing but excuses for health care failures
House Republicans unveiled their latest nonanswers about how they’ll fix rising health care costs caused by their refusal to renew enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits.
No laughing matter: Trump impersonator launches very real House bid
As New Jersey gears up for a special election to fill an empty seat in Congress next year, one political comedian is looking to turn his talk into action. J-L Cauvin, a lawyer by day and Trump-impersonating stand-up comic by night, is trading in his blond wig and MAGA hat to jump into a very crowded race to fill Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s former seat.
Watch this Democrat blast Trump over endless empty health care promises
Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts delivered a series of blistering speeches on the House floor as Congress debated what he called a “stupid pathetic last minute bill designed to let Republicans cover their ass before they flee town for the holidays.” And he isn’t wrong.
For more video content, check out Daily Kos on YouTube.
GNU Debugger 17.1 Released With CET Shadow Stack Support, New DAP Features
Dec. 20th, 2025 11:25 amphoronix_feedThe GNU Debugger "GDB" 17.1 is out today with a number of new features for enhancing the open-source debugging experience...
America's Worst Humans
Dec. 20th, 2025 04:30 pmatrios_feedThe identification of Valente brings calm to communities worried about a mass killer on the loose. But it also puts the lie to theories floated by right-wing influencers, including Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire.
In recent days, Maguire, acting as a self-appointed digital detective, has shared posts suggesting that an entirely different man was behind the crimes—a Palestinian student at Brown University. On December 16, in a post on X that has subsequently been deleted, Maguire speculated that “it seems very likely” that the student was behind the shooting, pointing to the fact that “Brown is actively scrubbing his online presence.”
In fact, the student’s digital footprints were being wiped as a protective measure against rampant, errant speculation about his link to the shootings.
Racial harassment against Black students ignored under Trump
Dec. 20th, 2025 04:00 pmdailykos_feedSince Trump returned to office, the Education Department’s civil rights office has not resolved a single racial harassment investigation. It sends a message that “people impacted by racial discrimination ... don’t matter,” one attorney said.
By Jennifer Smith Richards, Megan O’Matz and Jodi S. Cohen for ProPublica
In Colorado, students taunted their Black classmates by playing whipping sounds on their cellphones and saying they should be shot “to make us a better race.”
The only two Black students in a small district in Ohio were called the N-word by white peers starting on their first day. They got accustomed to hearing slurs like “porch monkey” and being told to go pick cotton.
And at a school in Illinois, white students included Confederate flags in their PowerPoint presentations for class assignments and shook a school bus as Black students were exiting to try to make them tumble off.
In each case, the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights arm investigated and concluded that school districts didn’t do enough to stop racial hostility toward Black students. It struck agreements with those districts to require changes and to monitor them for months, if not years. They were among roughly 50 racial harassment cases the OCR resolved in the last three years.
But that sort of accountability has ended under the second administration of President Donald Trump. Nearly a year since he took office, the department’s Office for Civil Rights has not entered into a single new resolution agreement involving racial harassment of students, a ProPublica analysis found.
“The message that it sends is that the people impacted by racial discrimination and harassment don’t matter,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, an attorney with a Texas nonprofit that has worked with families who’ve filed racial harassment complaints with OCR.
Related | Trump's push for 'patriotic education' is predictably corrupt and dumb
The Education Department had been investigating nine complaints in the Lubbock-Cooper school district tied to racial discrimination, but Duggins-Clay said she and others involved in the cases haven’t heard from the department this year.
The OCR regularly resolves dozens of racial harassment cases a year and did so even during Trump’s first administration. In the last days of the Biden administration, OCR workers pushed to close out several racial harassment agreements, including one that was signed by the district the day after Trump was inaugurated. With Trump in office, the agency has shifted to resolving cases involving allegations of discrimination against white students.
At the same time, the administration has been clear about its goal of dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs across all facets of American life. This has been especially pronounced at schools and colleges, where the administration has also eroded protections for transgender students and considerations for historically disadvantaged groups.
Internal department data obtained by ProPublica shows that more than 1,000 racial harassment investigations initiated in previous administrations still are open. Most of those complaints involve harassment of Black students.
Not only has the Education Department failed to enter into any resolution agreements in those racial harassment cases, but it also has not initiated investigations of most new complaints. Since Jan. 20, it has opened only 14 investigations into allegations of racial harassment of Black students. In that same time period, more than 500 racial harassment complaints have been received, the internal data shows.
The Education Department did not respond to ProPublica’s questions and requests for comment. Trump is working to shutter the Education Department, and the agency has not updated online case information typically accessible to the public since he took office.
Under Trump, OCR even stopped monitoring many districts the agency previously found had violated students’ civil rights — including some that the OCR rebuked days before Trump took office. In most cases, districts had agreed to be monitored.
On Jan. 13, the OCR closed out a nearly three-year investigation into the Cottonwood-Oak Creek Elementary District in Arizona, which it found had made “minimal and ineffective” attempts to address racial and sexual harassment at the school.
A seventh grader who describes herself as Afro-Indigenous said school employees witnessed her being pushed, kicked and ridiculed for having darker skin, then having water poured over her head by a boy to “baptize” her for “the sin” of being gay, using a slur. But the school, according to records, merely documented the incidents and then removed the boy from music class for the last weeks of the school year.
Students in Cottonwood who identified as queer told an OCR investigator that they were having anxiety attacks and considering harming themselves after sustained harassment. Peers groped their bottoms and nipples and yelled, “That’s the homo way!” A teacher told OCR she heard a kindergartener use the N-word and saw swastikas doodled on notebooks, and students admitted saying “slavery is good” and “white power.” For many, the investigator found, school was a hostile, discriminatory place.
“Almost immediately my daughter’s whole personality changed. She just went from a vibrant, happy, confident person to a person with dark circles under her eyes,” said Kate Sierras, who filed a complaint with the OCR on behalf of her daughter, the girl who was “baptized.” Her daughter was heartbroken, she said.
“She started having panic attacks every day. It got to the point where I would drive her to school and she wouldn’t get out of the car.”
The district agreed to extensive training for staff, training for students and their parents, and a thorough audit of reported harassment for two school years. A district spokesperson said the district has tried to address OCR’s findings but that it never heard from OCR again after the agreement was reached.
“We’re prepared and ready to move forward as soon as they reach out,” the spokesperson said.
A Diminished “Dismissal Factory”
The OCR operates under a 1979 congressional mandate to ensure equal treatment at school for students regardless of race, gender or disability. As recently as last year, it remained one of the federal government’s largest enforcers of antidiscrimination laws, with nearly 600 civil rights workers.
It has weathered the prerogatives of each presidency. In Trump’s first term, the OCR took a less aggressive stance than in previous years. But as he entered office a second time, Trump was not ready to settle for incremental change. He pledged to carry out the long-held conservative dream of shutting down the Education Department. His education secretary, Linda McMahon, has decimated the OCR and shifted its purpose.
The Trump administration started the process of laying off hundreds of Education Department workers in March — about 300 of them from the OCR — and closed seven of the 12 regional civil rights offices. While court challenges played out, those workers have been on paid leave.
Amid the staffing chaos and the shift in priorities at the OCR, families’ discrimination complaints have piled up. When President Joe Biden left office, there were about 12,000 open investigations; now there are nearly 24,000. The majority involve students with disabilities, as has been the case historically.
At the same time, even getting complaints into the investigative queue is getting harder. Attorneys still on the job at OCR describe working in what they call a “dismissal factory.” Records filed in court cases show that most complaints filed by families have been dismissed without investigation.
“Real investigations are very infrequent now,” said Jason Langberg, who was an OCR attorney in Denver until this summer. “With more than half the workforce gone, pauses for various reasons, a shutdown — this is what you get.”
This month, the OCR ordered employees affected by the disputed layoffs back to work. In an email to those staff members on leave, the department said it still planned to fire them but now wants them to start working through its backlog.
The accumulation of cases that stalled mid-investigation include several in West Texas. One stems from allegations that white students accosted Black students with racial slurs and monkey sounds in the hallways at a middle school in the Lubbock-Cooper school district in 2022. Those complaints were being handled by the OCR’s Dallas office, which McMahon closed. “No information has been provided” about the cases since, according to a March court filing in one of the lawsuits to stop OCR layoffs.
Duggins-Clay, an attorney with the nonprofit Intercultural Development Research Association who has advocated for Lubbock-Cooper families, said the OCR had interviewed students and parents and was actively investigating their concerns through last year.
“We felt like OCR was close to making a determination. We thought we were going to be able to get a resolution in the next couple of months, early in 2025,” Duggins-Clay said.
She emailed the investigator in July and got an automated reply that the employee no longer had access to the email. “There has been no outreach, no communication, nothing. Period,” she said.
District officials said in a statement that they also haven’t heard from the OCR this year. The board of trustees passed a resolution in 2023 condemning racial harassment, and the district “remains committed to fostering a strong, welcoming climate for students and the community, and addressing concerns promptly and thoroughly whenever they arise,” the statement said.
The OCR did reach out in July to Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Kentucky — to sanction it for its efforts to address discrimination against Black students. In September 2024, under the Biden administration, the district had agreed to address OCR’s finding that it disproportionately disciplined Black students and to put in place measures to halt unfair treatment.
Trump’s Education Department, however, warned the district that it “will not tolerate” efforts to consider racial disparities in discipline practices and accused the district of “making students less safe.” Then it revoked a nearly $10 million federal magnet-school grant and chastised the district for having sent extra funding to schools with more students of color.
Related | Trump follows through on promise to destroy the Education Department
The district revised its school funding formula in response but has asked an administrative law judge within the Education Department to reinstate the grant, which is designed to help further school desegregation nationwide and ensure all students have access to a high-quality education.
The OCR’s work has slowed, but racial harassment of Black students at school hasn’t, said Talbert W. Swan II, president of the Greater Springfield NAACP in Massachusetts. Only last year in his community, white students in the Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District held a mock “slave auction” on Snapchat, bidding for the sale of Black students.
The district agreed to address racial bullying and to be monitored by the state attorney general through this school year.
“When you’re talking about 13-year-olds holding a slave auction, it lets you know that these racist attitudes are not dying,” said Swan, who also is senior pastor of the Spring Of Hope Church Of God In Christ. “They’re being reproduced over and over again from generation to generation.”
Civil Rights Enforcement Abandoned
In North Carolina, one district sees Trump’s view on civil rights enforcement as a way out of a resolution agreement reached at the end of the Biden administration.
An OCR investigation at mostly white Carteret County Public Schools had found that students had hurled racial slurs at two Black teenagers who had enrolled mid-year. Classmates cornered one of the boys in a bathroom stall and taunted him about his darker skin.
The boys’ family pleaded with school officials to intervene. In response to these incidents, administrators offered access to a staff-only restroom; the school’s police officer suggested that one of the boys leave school 10 minutes early, and the principal permitted the other to skip class. Administrators viewed the harassment at Croatan High School as isolated incidents because there were many different perpetrators, records show.
William Hart II, whose son and nephew were the targets of harassment, said it was so unbearable — and the district’s reaction so inadequate — that he and his wife moved the family to Florida after just four months in Carteret County. Both students graduated, and Hart’s nephew joined the U.S. Air Force. Both remain in therapy trying to make sense of the traumatic time.
“I never would’ve thought my boys would go through this. I thought my generation would be the last to deal with it. My father went to a segregated school growing up in North Carolina,” Hart said. “We thought it would be different.”
On Jan. 16, investigators struck an agreement with the Carteret County district. But in February, the district urged OCR to nullify its findings and the deal given the “dramatic changes underway in Washington, D.C.,” according to emails from the district to the OCR that were obtained by ProPublica.
The agreement was based on the previous administration’s “notion of diversity, equity and inclusion,” wrote Neil Whitford, the attorney for the district.
“The election of Trump as President has made it crystal clear that DEI at the federal level is dead,” he wrote.
Whitford told ProPublica in an email that the district has an excellent reputation and prides itself on having strong antidiscrimination policies. The district, he said, handled the racial harassment of the two boys well and has completed some terms of the resolution agreement even though it maintains it broke no civil rights laws.
Records show that no one from the OCR has responded to the Carteret County district since February, including to its request to dismiss the agreement and postpone any remaining reform efforts.
Pyramid secured
Dec. 20th, 2025 03:43 pmuniversal_hub_feed
Bright lights, big(ish) pyramid.
The Fort Pointer reports the Boston Police Harbor Unit motored over from their usual patrol lanes in the Harbor and helped secure Don Eyle's tempest-tossed pyramid to the Fort Point pier last night, where it'll be safe until it can be re-moored to its usual spot in the middle of the channel.
Thanks to crew members Jack and Jesse, and a shout-out to Harbormaster Cheevers. BPD Harbor Unit can always be counted on in a pinch.
Neighborhoods:
Free tagging:
Linux Mint 22.3 Beta Released With Cinnamon 6.6 Desktop
Dec. 20th, 2025 10:37 amphoronix_feedThe beta release of Linux Mint 22.3 "Zena" is now available for testing ahead of the holidays for this latest incremental update to this desktop OS built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base...
Reciprocity
Dec. 20th, 2025 02:30 pmatrios_feedThe important thing here is that RFKjr inteends to kill a lot of children, but realize that eventually everyone is going to need proof of vaccination to travel.
The Trump administration plans to shift the federal government away from directly recommending most vaccines for children and suggest they receive fewer shots to more closely align with Denmark’s immunization model, according to two people familiar with the matter.
They keep invoking Denmark but that is just cover. How can you object to Denmark, libtard?
Caribbean Matters: Déjà vu? Memories of the US invasion of Panama
Dec. 20th, 2025 02:00 pmdailykos_feedCaribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.
As the Trump regime continues to order patrols and murders in the Caribbean and a Navy ship has seized a Venezuelan oil tanker and sanctioned six more, the White House’s orange occupant has pardoned a major drug trafficker, all the while ranting incoherently.
The current chaos brings back memories of another POTUS: George H.W. Bush and the invasion of Panama, nicknamed “Operation Just Cause.”.
It happened 36 years ago. I was 42 at the time and a very politically active opponent of Bush and his predecessor Ronald Reagan.
The headlines in 1986 were breathless, like this one from The New York Times:
PANAMA STRONGMAN SAID TO TRADE IN DRUGS, ARMS AND ILLICIT MONEY
A senior Reagan Administration official would not discuss the assertions against General Noriega, who was previously head of military intelligence and became army commander when Brig. Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera was killed in a helicopter crash in 1981. The Administration official expressed concern that the intelligence information would damage relations with Panama if it was seen as reflecting the views of the White House.
Officials in the Reagan Administration and past Administrations said in interviews that they had overlooked General Noriega's illegal activities because of his cooperation with American intelligence and his willingness to permit the American military extensive leeway to operate in Panama.
They said, for example, that General Noriega had been a valuable asset to Washington in countering insurgencies in Central America and was now cooperating with the Central Intelligence Agency in providing sensitive information from Nicaragua.
Sound familiar? You can see our country’s dubious history outlined in this Al Jazeera report from Sarah Shimim titled “Meet the US’s drug running friends: A history of narcotics involvement”:
US President Donald Trump claims to be cracking down on drug gangs in Venezuela but has pardoned a Honduran drug lord serving 45 years in the US.
A subheadline in the story asks this crucial question:
“If Trump wants to clamp down on drugs, why did he pardon Hernandez?”
Back to Operation “Just Cause”—which could easily be renamed “Operation Unjust,” but we’re stuck with the propaganda-laden moniker.
The Zinn Education Project has this summary of what ensued:
On Dec. 20, 1989, the United States invaded Panama in “Operation Just Cause.” Howard Zinn provides a description in chapter 21 of A People’s History of the United States:
As if to prove that the gigantic military establishment was still necessary, the Bush administration, in its four-year term, launched two wars: a “small” one against Panama and a massive one against Iraq.
Coming into office in 1989, George Bush was embarrassed by the new defiant posture of Panama’s dictator, General Manuel Noriega. Noriega’s regime was corrupt, brutal, authoritarian, but President Reagan and Vice-President Bush had overlooked this because Noriega was useful to the United States. He cooperated with the CIA in many ways, such as offering Panama as a base for contra operations against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and meeting with Colonel Oliver North to discuss sabotage targets in Nicaragua. When he was director of the CIA in 1976-1977, Bush had protected Noriega.
But by 1987 Noriega’s usefulness was over, his activities in the drug trade were in the open, and he became a convenient target for an administration which wanted to prove that the United States, apparently unable to destroy the Castro regime or the Sandinistas or the revolutionary movement in El Salvador, was still a power in the Caribbean.
Claiming that it wanted to bring Noriega to trial as a drug trafficker (he had been indicted in Florida on that charge) and also that it needed to protect U.S. citizens (a military man and his wife had been threatened by Panamanian soldiers), the United States invaded Panama in December 1989, with 26,000 troops.
People who don’t know this history and history buffs alike can watch several YouTube mini documentaries like this one from the “Simple History” channel:
The most important documentry you may not have seen received an Academy Award in1993 for Best Documentary Feature. The film is “The Panama Deception.”
Here’s the trailer:
The full documentary cannot be embedded here, but the film is available for viewing online.
Director Barbara Trent and Jean-Manuel Beauchamp, grandson of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, discussed the film in this 2011 forum:
Vincent Canby reviewed it for The New York Times in “Invasion of Panama: Rooting Out the Reason”:
"The Panama Deception," opening today at the Village East Cinema, is a tough, provocative, highly opinionated and slickly produced documentary, an answer to the official United States Government line about the 1989 invasion of Panama.
Barbara Trent, the film's director; David Kasper, the writer and editor, and their colleagues say the principal purpose of the invasion was not to liberate Panama from the control of a ruthless dictator and to bring Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega to trial on drug charges. Rather, they say, it was to destabilize the country and destroy Panama's Defense Forces, creating a situation that would allow the United States to renegotiate the treaties, signed by President Jimmy Carter, under which the canal is to be turned over to the Panamanians by the year 2000.
The film is full of witnesses: policy makers, official spokesmen, politicians, informed observers, flunkies, historians and ordinary folk, many of them Panamanian victims of the war that, the film points out, was covered by the American news organizations almost entirely in terms that served official United States interests. This is hardly a scoop, but it's something that needs repeating for Americans who judge the importance of everything that happens in the rest of the world, whether it's a war or the Olympics, from the hometown point of view.
"The Panama Deception" puts the 1989 invasion in a historical context, presenting it as a continuation of the policies by which the United States first acquired rights over what would become the Panama Canal Zone under President Theodore Roosevelt. The film sees the actions of President Bush and his Administration as no less high-handed but possibly even more sorrowful in the light of what is supposed to be a better informed, more liberal age.
When Noriega died in 2017, The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall wrote and obituary titllled “Manuel Noriega: feared dictator was the man who knew too much”:
“Panamanian general was a CIA asset and go-between in Central America’s dirty wars but became a monster the US could not control,” read the subheadline.
The atmosphere outside Gen Manuel Noriega’s battered, bullet-scarred comandancia, headquarters of the Panamanian Defence Forces, one early morning in October 1989, bordered on frenetic. Beyond the railings a woman sobbed with grief. Her husband, an officer involved in the previous night’s failed coup attempt against Noriega, was missing. It later transpired he and dozens of co-conspirators had been shot out of hand.
[...]
“Who did this? Who did this?” waiting journalists shouted through the railings, meaning who was responsible for this crude attempt at forcible regime change. “The Americans did this! The piranhas did this. They want to finish Panama!” Noriega shouted back in Spanish. Then, as if fearing the Yanquis might take another shot at him, “Pineapple Face” (as Noriega was known, due to his pock-marked skin) hurried back inside.
Noriega, who died on Monday at the age of 83, was right to be nervous. The October coup attempt marked a turning point in Washington’s attitude to a man whose rise to power it had assisted, who became a valued CIA cold war asset and go-between in Central America’s dirty wars, but who turned into a monster US spy bosses could no longer control. Noriega had outlived his usefulness. Now he was an embarrassment. So Bush made him America’s most wanted.When Noriega subsequently launched a vicious wave of repression, threatened American personnel guarding the Panama Canal and declared a “state of war” with the US, Bush pounced. Economic sanctions and quiet diplomacy had failed. Control over the strategically and economically vital canal was threatened. And Noriega knew too much. In December 1989, Bush ordered Gen Colin Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to launch Operation Just Cause, sending 26,000 invasion troops into Panama in a rehearsal of the Powell “doctrine of overwhelming force” that was next employed two years later in the first Gulf war.
[...]Noriega’s knowledge of US operations in Central America was detailed and highly compromising. He was said to have met Bush in person on more than one occasion. During the 1988 presidential campaign, Michael Dukakis, the Democrat nominee, attacked Bush for his close relationship with “Panamanian drug lord Noriega”. When Bush, as president, launched his signature “war on drugs”, Republicans worried about possible embarrassing contradictions.
In 1988, in the wake of Iran-contra, a Senate committee concluded: “The saga of ... Noriega represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures for the United States. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, Noriega was able to manipulate US policy toward his country, while skilfully accumulating near-absolute power in Panama. It is clear that each US government agency which had a relationship with Noriega turned a blind eye to his corruption and drug dealing.” Noriega was allowed to establish “the hemisphere’s first narco-kleptocracy”.
In case you missed these past articles, I’ve covered the history of the Panama Canal history here, and here.
Please join me in the comments section below for more discussion, and for the weekly Caribbean News roundup.
Gemini AI Yielding Sloppy Code For Ubuntu Development With New Helper Script
Dec. 20th, 2025 07:39 amphoronix_feedA few weeks ago it was mentioned by a Canonical engineer how trying to use AI to modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker yielded some code that was "plain wrong" and other issues raised by that Microsoft GitHub Copilot code. The same Ubuntu developer shifted to trying Gemini AI to generate a helper script to assist in Ubuntu's monthly ISO snapshot releases. Google's Gemini AI also generated some sloppy code for a Python script to assist in those Ubuntu releases...
How Europe’s new carbon tax on imported goods will change global trade
Dec. 20th, 2025 12:15 pmarstechnica_feedFor people living in the European Union, the price of their next car, home renovation, and even local produce may soon reflect a climate policy that many have never even heard of. This new regulation, which comes fully into force on New Year’s Day, does not just target heavy industry—it affects everyday goods which now face an added carbon cost when they enter Europe.
The carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) puts a carbon price on many imported goods—meaning that EU-based importers will pay for the greenhouse gases emitted during the production of certain carbon-intensive materials.
If goods come from countries with weaker climate rules, then the charge will be higher. To sell to the EU, producers will effectively need to show their goods aren’t too carbon-intensive.
Mesa 26.0 NVK Driver Lands Improvement For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs
Dec. 20th, 2025 06:12 amphoronix_feedIn addition to the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver in Mesa merging compression support for big performance wins, another performance optimization was merged earlier in the week that stand to benefit GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" graphics processors...
LoongArch Promoted To Being An Official Architecture For Debian 14
Dec. 20th, 2025 05:50 amphoronix_feedTwo years and a few months after LoongArch 64-bit "Loong64" was added to Debian Ports, it's now been promoted to being an official architecture for Debian Linux...
KDE Plasma 6.6 Finally Supporting Ambient Light Sensors, Fixing Windows Games With HDR
Dec. 20th, 2025 05:25 amphoronix_feedThere are some nice KDE Plasma 6.6 improvements that were merged ahead of Christmas...
DragonFlyBSD's VirtIO Block Driver Lands Multi-Queue Support
Dec. 20th, 2025 05:10 amphoronix_feedFor helping with the I/O performance in virtualized environments, merged this week to the DragonFlyBSD development code is multi-queue support for its VirtIO block "virtio_blk" driver...
propublica_feedJudges across Tennessee are now demanding greater accountability from people who have been ordered to give up their guns, a shift aimed at strengthening protections for domestic violence victims.
The change is being adopted county by county, after state lawmakers bowed to opposition from the National Rifle Association over a bill that would have taken that reform statewide.
The move follows reporting by WPLN and ProPublica over the past two years that found Tennessee’s lax gun laws and enforcement have allowed firearms to remain in dangerous hands. The state consistently has one of the highest rates of women killed by men, and most of those homicides are committed with guns. The news organizations’ analysis found that about 1 in 4 victims of domestic violence gun homicides were killed by someone who was barred from having a firearm.
In Tennessee, when someone is convicted of a domestic violence charge or is subject to an order of protection, they are not allowed to possess a gun. A person ordered to relinquish their firearm can turn it over to a third party, like a friend or relative, for safekeeping. But the state doesn’t require them to disclose whose hands the weapon ends up in. Advocates say that makes it hard to ensure that the guns were given up — and that they were given to someone who is legally allowed to hold on to them.
As part of its investigation, WPLN and ProPublica reported on an East Tennessee county that had transformed its justice system for domestic violence victims. Scott County’s reforms include a requirement that when a court is stripping domestic violence abusers of their guns, they must tell the court in a written affidavit who is going to take custody of their weapons. The county also asks for the address of that person, who is asked to sign an affidavit saying they are in receipt of the weapons. None of these extra measures of accountability, however, are required on the state’s standard gun-dispossession form.
“The [state’s] form is really incomplete,” said Becky Bullard with Nashville’s Office of Family Safety. “We can’t have someone dispossess of their firearm lawfully if we don’t know who they’re giving the gun to.”
At least nine counties, including Tennessee’s two largest, Davidson and Shelby, have amended the state’s gun dispossession affidavit to require information about who will be taking possession of the weapon. Other counties are also considering the change, advocates say.
“When I heard about what Scott County was doing, I was shocked,” said Shelby County Judge Greg Gilbert, who adjusted that court’s form when he found out that courts were able to do that themselves. “It does make it a little more likely that people will take this seriously.”
Last year, two Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would have made Scott County’s form the default for the rest of the state, but the bill was pushed to 2026 after opposition from the Tennessee Firearms Association and the NRA. Neither association responded to requests for comment at the time. One of the lawmakers who introduced the bill, Sen. Becky Massey, a Knox County Republican, said she would move forward with the bill again if her House counterpart, Rep. Kelly Keisling, did. But Keisling, a Republican whose district includes Scott County, said he is “uncertain as to the future of this particular piece of legislation.”
This month, advocates for victims of domestic violence also pushed for a state council on domestic violence to recommend adoption of the amended form. That effort failed after a procedural mishap; the group plans to revisit the topic at its next meeting in March.
“We really do not have a minute to lose. This is a battle that we have been fighting around a form for years,” said Bullard, who has advocated for this reform since a deadly shooting in 2018 at a Waffle House where the man traveled with a gun that he was ordered to give up. “And it could affect someone in the next minute.”
The post A County’s Move to Protect Domestic Violence Victims Is Spreading Across Tennessee After Legislative Delay appeared first on ProPublica.
propublica_feedLast week, ProPublica published a five-part series that I wrote with senior research reporter Doris Burke about Albany, Georgia, and its only hospital, Phoebe Putney Memorial. We started working on the story five years ago, when COVID-19 was racing around the globe and Albany — small, remote and barely touched by time — had the world’s fourth-highest case rate.
We initially set out to write a David-vs.-Goliath narrative about the town’s response to the crisis. But, as I write in the series, there came a turning point at which we realized there were more enduring questions and challenges facing Albany than COVID-19. They were about race and power.
In the weeks immediately following the outbreak, when the pandemic made it too risky for me to travel, I monitored the city’s daily press briefings and the hospital’s flood of social media posts on Facebook. That, I thought, was where the first draft of Albany’s COVID-19 story was being written, and the narrative that was being pushed in them felt disturbingly familiar.
Albany is a majority Black city of some 67,000 people. However, while Black residents were dying in disproportionate numbers, the officials leading the response were white: the mayor, the chair of the county government and the senior executives at Phoebe. At every briefing, officials announced the number of people who were sick with COVID-19 and the number of who’d died.
Then, in early April 2020, for the first time, they announced a name, not a number. The one person who merited personal recognition was Judge Nancy Stephenson. She was white.
The chief medical officer at the hospital, Dr. Stephen Kitchen, choked up when he announced her death. Mayor Kermit “Bo” Dorough took to the podium to ask for a moment of silence to mark the moment, saying it “brings many of the people in this community to the next phase of this battle because now we know someone who has been a victim of COVID.”
The chair of the county government at the time, Christopher Cohilas, proclaimed, “We have lost a tremendous jewel of this community. A jewel to the people.” Then he added, “I think that her passing highlights exactly how lethal this disease can be.”
I’m not going to lie. I cringed at what I was hearing. Some 38 people had died by then. The overwhelming majority were Black. There hadn’t been any named mentions or moments of silence at the press briefings for them. How could it be, I thought to myself, that it wasn’t until Stephenson’s death that the city’s leaders understood how lethal the disease could be?
The comments that came pouring into the live chat of the video briefing made clear I wasn’t the only one asking that question.
One read, “Let’s not forget all the others who have passed, and who are known by others in our community.”
Another read, “So you extend condolences to the judge, but not your residents.”
And then there was this: “So now it hits home.”
That moment resonated with me because two decades earlier I’d written a piece as part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for The New York Times about how histories written by people in power — most of them white — tend to erase, minimize and misrepresent the experiences and contributions of those who are not.
That story was also set in the South. The series, titled “How Race Is Lived in America,” was meant to show how the systemic divisions that shape our society and each individual’s place in it are driven by day-to-day interactions at work, at school and in hospitals.
What I was seeing play out in Albany and at Phoebe felt like the stuff of a new installment. Not only did it seem that city leaders had failed to recognize the magnitude of the crisis until one of their own had died, they had also made those bearing the brunt of the pandemic feel responsible for their own demise. According to the official narrative, the outbreak started at a Black funeral, and the reason Black people were so vulnerable to the virus was because they didn’t take care of themselves.
On my first visit to Albany, I met Pastor Daniel Simmons, the leader of Mt. Zion Baptist Church. He made clear he was skeptical of the prevailing narrative and encouraged me not to fall for it either.
“If Albany, Georgia, had done things differently over the years, our community wouldn’t have been as vulnerable as it was,” he said. “If the health care system was different, if it had a different relationship with poor people and people of color, the outcome would have been different.”
The main lesson that he hoped I and other people would take from Albany’s COVID-19 crisis was: “It didn’t have to be this way.”
What he and others told me had been left out of that narrative was how hard it had been for African Americans in Albany, particularly those who are poor and uninsured, to get safe and affordable health care in a city whose dominant institution is a hospital. Phoebe Putney Health System is not only the largest provider of health care in southwest Georgia, it is also Albany’s largest employer and property owner. The health system’s CEO, Scott Steiner, said the hospital’s mission is to provide care regardless of race, religion and ability to pay, “but we’re always trying to balance that out with paying the bills.”
Doris and I spent the following four years exploring that part of Albany’s story, interviewing more than 150 sources and poring over thousands of pages of records. We learned that Phoebe was the only hospital in town because it had worked hard — even stealthily — and spent millions of dollars to drive out its old competitor, before finally managing to acquire it. The cost of care went up and quality went down. Meanwhile the more Phoebe grew, the more economically dependent Albany became, and the harder it was for patients to hold the hospital to account.
The CEO that oversaw Phoebe during the period of its most significant growth and the health system’s former attorney did not respond to detailed lists of questions. When we asked Phoebe’s current leaders for responses to our findings, a hospital spokesperson accused us of intentionally excluding positive patient stories. “Most patients have positive experiences at Phoebe,” he said. “Ignoring that fact is wrong.”
As for Doris and me, we were determined to focus on the people who tend to get left out of Albany’s, and the nation’s, stories because we believed they would resonate with anyone who has struggled to get the health care they need. We hope you’ll spend time with the whole series. You can read it here. Or you can listen here to an audio version, produced in collaboration with actors from Theater of War.
The post I Started Covering the COVID-19 Crisis in Albany, Georgia. This Moment Made Me Realize There Was a Bigger Story to Tell. appeared first on ProPublica.
Chrome/Chromium Add Support For Printing Via XDG Portal
Dec. 19th, 2025 08:28 pmphoronix_feedGoogle's Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for Linux printing via the XDG Portal. This is important to allow print support from within Flatpak or Snap sandboxed versions of Google's web browser...
Shocker: Trump regime won't follow law on Epstein files release
Dec. 20th, 2025 12:01 amdailykos_feedWell, we got our Friday Epstein Files news dump. Sort of.
The Department of Justice did indeed post some files. The website is messy, incomplete, and impossible to search. As in literally impossible—the search feature is utterly broken.
But the operative word here, really, is “some.” As in “not all.” Which we knew was coming, because Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche took time out from declaring war on judges who rule against the Trump administration to explain that the administration has no intention of obeying the law and releasing all the Epstein files by Friday’s deadline.
Todd, did it ever occur to you that judges might not consistently rule against you and your former private criminal defendant client, who now happens to be the current president of the United States, if you just followed the laws to begin with?
Blanche went on Fox News to announce the Department of Justice’s plan to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Complying would mean releasing all of the files about Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump’s longtime pal, by Friday But Blanche dares ask: what if we just don’t?
“I expect that we’re going to release several hundred thousand documents today. I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple of weeks,” Blanche said. “I expect several hundred thousand more.”
The law set a deadline for releasing all the files. Friday. Not the deadline to start to release and then roll it out over several weeks. Not the deadline to “expect” to release. Friday. All of them. Friday. Instead, we got some half-assed DOJ website with an impossible-to-navigate structure and no information as to how much has already been released and how much the DOJ still has left to try to read through and figure out a way to limit any damage to Trump.
But per Blanche, the delay is because they are just so gosh-darned worried about protecting Epstein’s victims. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these, and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials that we’re producing, that we’re protecting every single victim.”
This excuse might land better if Blanche’s boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, hadn’t bragged back in February about how she very sternly requested all the Epstein documents for her review. Or talked about how she was ready to review the Epstein client list sitting on her desk right away, only to later backtrack and say there was no such thing. Or if the DOJ hadn’t announced back on July 7 that it had finished its “exhaustive review of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein.”
If any of these things were actually true, these documents would have been reviewed multiple times, making a last-minute scramble to determine where victims’ names appeared and get them redacted unnecessary.
And it’s not like the administration didn’t know this was coming. Sure, they worked night and day to stop the release, and sure, House Speaker Mike Johnson basically shut down the House of Representatives to lend a hand, but given that the public pressure on this has been unrelenting for months, the DOJ could have been reviewing and redacting all along.
Unfortunately, when the administration thumbs its nose at yet another law, what on earth would be the recourse? Congress was barely able to get it together to pass a law requiring the release. The United States Supreme Court seems very willing to agree that if Trump doesn’t want to follow laws, he doesn’t have to.
Related | Epstein kept photos of Trump, young women, and sex toys
However, the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are smartly playing the long game here, releasing material in bits and pieces with no fixed schedule. Keep that threat hanging over the heads of Trump and the DOJ, House Democrats.
Blanche and Bondi aren’t in their roles to execute the laws, they are there to protect Trump. And if that means breaking the law, they don’t care.
Cartoon: Last-minute grifts
Dec. 19th, 2025 10:50 pmdailykos_feedFollow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website.
Related | Trump’s top aide exposes White House chaos—and regrets it
The Recap: Trump defiles the Kennedy Center and announces his very own Hunger Games
Dec. 19th, 2025 09:14 pmdailykos_feedA daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know.
Kennedy Center already defiled with Trump's name
When you’re determined to upstage a dead president in record time.
Wife of murdered bigot endorses Vance for 2028
That crucial Erika Kirk endorsement is sure to make all the difference.
Trump will host his version of the Hunger Games
May the odds be ever in your favor.
You want science-based medical care? Bah humbug!
Fox's spin reaches tornado levels over Trump's economy
It’s a perfect storm of denial.
Trump's favorite 'refugees' could get welcomed with racist freebies
Gotta indoctrinate them ASAP!
Why is Trump Media going nuclear?
It’s the latest in a long line of dodgy financial deals.
Wine 11.0-rc3 Released With Another Week Of Bug Fixing
Dec. 19th, 2025 05:33 pmphoronix_feedIn working toward the Wine 11.0 stable release in January, Wine 11.0-rc3 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate...
Sean Duffy's daughter won't stand for TSA treating her like a commoner
Dec. 19th, 2025 11:00 pmdailykos_feedTransportation Secretary Sean Duffy's daughter threw a fit on Thursday over having to go through airport security like everyone else, whining that she almost missed her flight because she refused to go through the full-body scanner and had to wait for a pat-down instead.
In a screed on X, Evita Duffy-Alfonso wrote:
I nearly missed my flight this morning after the TSA made me wait 15 minutes for a pat-down because I’m pregnant and didn’t feel like getting radiation exposure from their body scanner. The agents were passive-aggressive, rude, and tried to pressure me and another pregnant woman into just walking through the scanner because it’s “safe.” After finally getting the absurdly invasive pat-down, I barely made my flight. All this for an unconstitutional agency that isn’t even good at its job. Perhaps things would have gone more smoothly if I’d handed over my biometric data to a random private company (CLEAR). Then I could enjoy the special privilege of waiting in a shorter line to be treated like a terrorist in my own country. Is this freedom? Travel, brought to you by George Orwell—and the privilege of convenience based solely on your willingness to surrender biometric data and submit to radiation exposure? The “golden age of transportation” cannot begin until the TSA is gone.
Duffy-Alfonso went on to say that her dad would likely abolish the agency if he had the power to, but that the TSA is controlled by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and thus he can’t.
“TSA is under DHS, which is run by Kristi Noem. If he did have TSA, he’d radically limit it and lobby Congress to abolish it,” Duffy-Alfonso said in response to an X user who asked why her dad doesn’t do anything about TSA issues.
In yet another post, she wrote, “TSA = unreasonable, warrantless searches of passengers and their property. That means it violates the Fourth Amendment and is therefore unconstitutional,” requesting that Trump and Noem “pls abolish” it.
Where to begin?
First off, if waiting 15 minutes for a pat-down would make you almost miss your flight, maybe you should be a little more responsible and get to the airport earlier, like all of us mere mortals whose fathers aren't Cabinet officials have to do. Of course, the party of personal responsibility never takes responsibility for their own actions.
Second, the machine she refused to be scanned by is safe for pregnant people.
The full-body scanners are not X-rays. They use millimeter-wave technology, which "uses non-ionizing radiation in the form of low-level radio waves to scan a person's body,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Millimeter-wave technology does not use x-rays and does not add to a person's ionizing radiation dose," the CDC says, adding that the machines emit “thousands of times less energy than a cell phone."
The TSA agents she crapped on were right, and her MAHA-esque fears were unfounded.
Ultimately, the TSA agents were merely doing their jobs. To publicly shit-talk about them is low, but it’s par for the course for Republicans and the entitled Trump administration crowd, who regularly abuse their positions.
For example, Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel fly around on taxpayer-funded private jets for their own personal pleasure. Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina went on a weeks-long crusade against the TSA and law enforcement officers at a Charleston, South Carolina, airport because a security escort was reportedly late.
After her social media screed blew up, Duffy-Alfonso sought to do damage control, writing in an X response to her initial post, "I am 100% behind all that [Trump] & [DHS] has done to keep out terrorists and illegals, especially at the border. In fact, President Trump & [Noem] aren’t getting enough credit for achieving zero illegal border crossings and stopping deranged terrorists from coming into the U.S."
Maybe her daddy called her up to tell her to do cleanup after her impulsive tirade.
Duffy-Alfonso also sought to walk back her call to abolish TSA altogether, saying instead that "there needs to be more common sense around how we treat Americans exercising their right to travel. And I hope TSA works on improving their treatment of expectant mothers who don’t want to go through body scanners to protect their unborn children. We can do both."
To be sure, the security theater that TSA carries out has ballooned into a mess. But being an adult about your criticisms rather than a whiny, entitled jerk would've been the proper way to go about enacting change.
At the end of the day, it seems like Duffy-Alfonso is taking a different approach than her dad, who said air travel would benefit from people being classier dressers at the airport. Of course, what people wear is not why air travel has gone downhill. Having to be stuck with entitled whiners who cause scenes like his own daughter is why traveling sucks.