More Saturday Male Beauty

 

The Depth of MAGA’s and the GOP's Moral Collapse

Once upon a time the Republican Party outward stood for "family values"  - which largely meant opposing abortion and any rights for LGBT individuals - and so-called Christian values and there was an expectation that one was supposed to be supportive of some basic level of morality.  Those days are long gone as the GOP and MAGA are lead by an individual who is the embodiment of immorality, be it sexual assault on women, contempt for blacks and non-whites (something that traces back to the early 1970's, rank dishonesty and constant lies, to business corruption. Compounding this moral collapse is the white "Christian" nationalists and authors of Project 2025 who are now spread throughout the Felon's regime who wear the Christian moniker on their sleeves but have largely thrown the New Testament in the trash and only truly cling to cherry picked passages from the Old Testament that are used to justify everything from slavery to the dehumanization of anyone who is not white, heterosexual and an adherent to their poisonous version of "Christianity." Having followed the "Christian Right for well over three decades, none of this is surprising because the goals of these false Christians has long been to inflict their beliefs on all, destroy anyone of anything that goes against their toxic and ignorance embracing beliefs, and to strip anyone other than themselves of civil rights. With the Felon in power, they have been given permission to embrace racial bigotry, homophobia, and a general hatred of anyone they deem "other." Yes, some of these ugly currents always existed in America, but for the most part, decent, moral people did not loudly expose them.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the moral collapse of MAGA and the GOP:

When leaders of Young Republican groups around the country exchange texts that say “I love Hitler”; that joke about gas chambers and rape, approve of slavery, sneer about “watermelon people” and monkeys in zoos, and throw around words like faggot and retarded, they aren’t just exposing their own anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse. Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us.

Cruelty and humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency. With permission from [the Felon's] President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric and vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with Holocaust denial, and Stephen Miller’s rage-filled threats, the young loyalists who wrote the texts were speaking the language of the people they admire most. Nor was it surprising when, the day after Politico revealed the texts’ existence, the image of an American flag altered into the shape of a swastika appeared on the cubicle wall behind a staffer in the Capitol Hill office of a MAGA congressman. In that culture, the rehabilitation of the man who stands for the worst in humanity was inevitable.

Having been given permission from the country’s most powerful person, the Young Republicans received forgiveness from its second-most-powerful. Vice President J. D. Vance refused to condemn their words, explaining: “I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke—telling a very offensive, stupid joke—is cause to ruin their lives.” But the authors of the texts have already grown up—they’re men in their 20s and 30s, climbing the rungs of Republican Party ladders in Kansas, Arizona, Vermont, and New York, firm in the belief that the viler their language, the higher they’ll go. One is already an officeholder.

For Vance, ethical judgment has become a pure matter of partisanship, to the point of overcoming his most personal bonds. When a DOGE member was revealed to have posted “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and “Normalize Indian hate,” Vance—married to an Indian American—scoffed at the ensuing outrage and demanded that the offender be rehired. But when private citizens anywhere said something ugly about Charlie Kirk, the vice president went after their livelihood. Once morality is rotted out by partisan relativism, the floor gives way and the fall into nihilism is swift.

The abandonment of a universal morality isn’t just philosophically wrong—it’s politically stupid. Any successful opposition to Trump has to begin with a lucid understanding of what’s at stake: not just past and present harms done to the marginalized, but everything that Americans once believed they cared about, including the values that were co-opted by the right before MAGA abandoned them—respect for law and custom, patriotism, family ties, common decency.

To some liberals and progressives these values came to sound old-fashioned, corny, even dangerous. But anyone frightened by the country’s downward spiral has to believe that our society still shares them, and can still respond to them if someone makes the appeal.

If the Young Republicans’ texts are seen merely as attacks on the groups they name, then they become the problem of Black and gay people, Jews, and women. But the texts represent a larger atrocity, one that has befallen all of America. Once you base moral judgments on group identity and political convenience, it becomes possible for people on the left to be anti-racist and anti-Semitic, and for people on the right to embrace Muslim haters in Israel and Jew haters in Germany.

If moral values aren’t simple and universal—if they require a facility with the language of graduate seminars and single-issue activism—they won’t move the immobilized, alienated, numb Americans who still haven’t given up on their country’s promise. The dehumanization of any group dehumanizes everyone. There will never be an end to learning this lesson.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Vance Defends Racist GOP Group Chat

Here in Virginia, Democrat Attorney General candidate Jay Jones is being attacked by Republicans for unfortunate private text messages (which have not been presented in their full context) even as the same Republicans ignore the calls for violence against Democrats and political opponents uttered almost daily by the Felon and his minions who increasingly label anyone against his cruel and perverse policies, much less those who engaging in peaceful protests, as "terrorists." Sadly, much of the mainstream media remains cowed and is failing to condemn the endless threats and and calls for violence uttered by the Felon, his imitators in the Republican Party not to mention the talking heads (and professional liars) at Fox News.  Candidly, its more of the false equivalency, if not double standard, we have seen for well over a decade as the GOP has lurched towards something unrecognizable compared to the GOP of my youth and young adulthood.  Tellingly, in the wake of Politico's expose of the young Republican chat group that engaged in overtly racist, pro-Hitler, and politically violent rhetoric, JD Vance is defending the ugly statements and behavior Politico revealed.   A piece at The Atlantic looks at Vance's conduct.  Here are excerpts:

This week, Politico revealed the contents of Young Republican leaders’ group chats, which were filled with rampant bigotry, endorsements of rape, and praise for a certain fascist dictator (“I love Hitler”).

Some Republicans, including those who have directly employed the people in these chats, condemned these messages. But Vice President J. D. Vance had a different, and more telling, response. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching,” he posted on X defiantly.

When a political ally does something controversial, there are three ways to respond: defend it, repudiate it, or deflect attention away from it. Defense is the obvious option if you think the action is acceptable enough to the public. Repudiation makes sense if the matter is so toxic that you can’t afford to keep the guilty party in your coalition. Deflection is the response of choice only when the behavior of an ally is too toxic to defend, but so widespread within your coalition that you cannot afford to criticize it.

Deflection can take different forms. You can insist that the story does not merit attention, because other issues are more important (as if the public can entertain only one subject at a time). Alternatively, you might claim that the offenders in question are too powerless to be held publicly accountable. Vance employed both tactics. “Grow up! I’m sorry; focus on the real issues. Don’t focus on what kids say in group chats,” he said on The Charlie Kirk Show. This despite the fact that the participants included people in their 30s, and many work as high-level staffers in Republican politics.

A decade or so ago, as illiberal norms were spreading in progressive spaces such as universities, deflection was by far the most popular way for Democrats to address the subject. Why focus on the excesses of the left when the right is doing worse things?, many progressives would insist, as if the awfulness of the other side precludes ever criticizing one’s own.

This dynamic is now playing out on the right. Yet the rhetoric in the Republican chats is far more disturbing, in both its nature and its influence.

That a group of ambitious professional Republicans can spread nakedly racist messages without rebuke signifies the transformation of conservative political norms in the Trump era. Party members now regularly engage in what the political commentator Richard Hanania has called the “based ritual,” a kind of game of rhetorical one-upsmanship. The only professional risk they perceive is being seen as insufficiently devoted to the MAGA cult. Displays of devotion involve espousing authoritarian, racist, and sexist concepts.

Given Vance’s evident ambitions to succeed Donald Trump as the Republican standard-bearer, his response is revealing.

The vice president apparently grasps that openly defending references to Black people as “watermelon eaters” and quips about sending political rivals “to the gas chamber” would hurt his political standing, but he also clearly needs these Young Republican leaders if he hopes to consolidate the Trump base behind him. Deflection is a calculated response. In the racist provocations of conservative cadres, Vance clearly sees the future of the party he intends to lead. 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Trump Tariffs To Cost Consumers $1.2 Trillion In 2025

Remember all the whining and wailing from those on the political right both in media reports and social media posts about inflation and rising prices in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election?  Remember too how the Felon promised to lower prices on day one of his second regime?  Nine months in and the Felon has not delivered on his promise to lower prices and, worse yet, prices have only increased driven in part by the Felon's arbitrary tariff and trade war polices and retaliation.  Indeed, this week it was reported that the average new car cost will now be $50,000.00 or more (more than I paid for my first house in 1979) with no relief in sight.  Meanwhile, American manufacturing jobs have declined, not increased as promised by the Felon, and the agriculture industry has been devastated by lost markets in China and the Felon's cruel deportation policies adversely impacting agricultural laborers. Canada is now importing more cars directly from Mexico than from the USA and international tourism to the USA has plummeted. Had Joe Biden or some other Democrat done such economic damage the MAGA base would be apoplectic, yet much of MAGA world is silent, seeming willing to be savaged economically in exchange for the Felon's blatantly racist policies and efforts to restore unbridled white supremacy. A piece at CNBC looks at the tariff costs borne by American consumers in 2025: 

President Donald Trump’s tariffs will cost global businesses upward of $1.2 trillion in 2025, with most of the cost being passed onto consumers, according to a new analysis from S&P Global.

In a white paper released Thursday, the firm said its estimate of additional expenses for companies is probably conservative. The price tag comes from information provided by some 15,000 sell-side analysts across 9,000 companies who contribute to S&P and its proprietary research indexes.

“The sources of this trillion-dollar squeeze are broad. Tariffs and trade barriers act as taxes on supply chains and divert cash to governments; logistics delays and freight costs compound the effect,” author Daniel Sandberg said in the report. “Collectively, these forces represent a systemic transfer of wealth from corporate profits to workers, suppliers, governments, and infrastructure investors.”

Trump in April slapped 10% tariffs on all goods entering the U.S. and listed individual “reciprocal” tariffs for dozens of other countries. Since then, the White House has entered a series of negotiations and agreements while also adding duties on a variety of individual items such as kitchen cabinets, autos and timber.

[T]he S&P analysis . . . . says that just one-third will be borne by companies, with the rest falling on the shoulders of consumers, under conservative estimates. The figures incorporated a $907 billion hit to covered companies with the remainder to uncovered firms as well as private equity and venture capital.

“With real output declining, consumers are paying more for less, suggesting that this two-thirds share represents a lower bound on their true burden,” said Sandberg, who wrote the report along with Drew Bowers, a senior quantitative analyst at S&P Global.

The size of the tariff hit and the burden of the costs are critical both for the White House looking to sell the duties as essential to restoring a fair trade balance, and to policymakers at the Federal Reserve looking to calibrate the proper balance for monetary policy.

The consensus looks for a 64 basis point contraction in profit margins this year, fading to 28 basis points for 2026 and then 8 to 10 basis points in 2027-28. A basis point equals 0.01%.

“In effect, 2025 locked in the hit; 2026 and 2027 will test whether the market’s optimism about re-equilibration is warranted,” the authors wrote. “For now, consensus envisions a world where margins eventually recover to pre-tariff trajectories. Whether that faith proves justified will depend on how firms adapt through technology, cost discipline and reshaped global value chains that have defined this cycle.”

The impact also likely will depend on how Trump’s tariff strategy evolves. The White House currently is back in heightened tensions with China over a rare earth dispute and Trump’s intentions to retaliate.

The S&P paper found that Trump’s removal in May of the “de minimis” exception for goods under $800 was “the real inflection point” for how hard tariffs would bite. The exception had allowed low-priced goods to sail under previous tariff barriers, but “had become politically untenable.”

“When the exemption closed, the shock rippled through shipping data, earnings reports, and executive commentary,” Sandberg said.

So much "winning"!

 

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

The Felon's Refugee System That Would Favor White People

During the 2024 presidential campaign the Felon denied knowing anything about Project 2025, a white supremacist/white "Christian" nationalist agenda that, if one bothered to read it laid out a plan to take America backwards in time to the 1950's prior to the civil rights movement, efforts for women's equality and the gay rights movement among other things.   Like virtually everything that comes out of the Felon's mouth, such denials were an outright lie and over the last almost nine months we have witnessed the steady implementation of aspects of Project 2025's racist agenda.  The Felon has reversed executive orders in place since the 1960's dealing with discrimination and diversity, equity and inclusion have been declared to be the enemy of "real Americans" and universities and cities that have non-discrimination policies have been threated with the loss of federal funding. Throughout the Felon's regime - and running through Project 2025 - is the effort is to favor a toxic right-wing form of supposed Christianity (that largely ignores the true gospel message) and to  reenforce/reestablish white privilege reminiscent to that existing prior to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, there is an almost palpable fear of non-whites and a belief that anything that benefits non-whites and/or non-Christians comes at the expense of whites.  Now, this agenda is aimed at transforming America's approach to refugees into one where only whites/Europeans are admitted. A piece in the New York Times looks at this effort:

The Trump administration is considering a radical overhaul of the U.S. refugee system that would slash the program to its bare bones while giving preference to English speakers, white South Africans and Europeans who oppose migration, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

The proposals, some of which already have gone into effect, would transform a decades-old program aimed at helping the world’s most desperate people into one that conforms to [the Felon's] Mr. Trump’s vision of immigration — which is to help mostly white people who say they are being persecuted while keeping the vast majority of other people out.

The plans were presented to the White House in April and July by officials in the State and Homeland Security Departments after President Trump directed federal agencies to study whether refugee resettlement was in the interest of the United States. . . . Trump administration officials have not ruled out any of the ideas, according to people familiar with the planning, although there is no set timetable for approving or rejecting the ideas.

The proposed changes would put new emphasis on whether applicants would be able to assimilate into the United States, directing them to take classes on “American history and values” and “respect for cultural norms.”

The proposals also advise Mr. Trump to prioritize Europeans who have been “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.”

That appeared to be a reference to the European far-right political party Alternative for Germany, whose leaders have trivialized the Holocaust, revived Nazi slogans and denigrated foreigners. Vice President JD Vance has criticized Germany for trying to suppress the views of the group, which is known as the AfD.

[The Felon] Mr. Trump enacted some of the proposals in the documents even before the plans were submitted to him, including slashing refugee admissions and offering priority status to Afrikaners, the white minority who once ran South Africa’s brutal apartheid system. . . . [the Felon] Mr. Trump has claimed that Afrikaners face racial persecution in their home country, a claim vigorously disputed by government officials there. Police statistics do not show that white people are more vulnerable to violent crime than other people in South Africa.

Taken together, the proposals provide a window into Mr. Trump’s intentions for a program that has come to symbolize America’s role as a sanctuary.

Mr. Trump and many American voters have rejected that role after years of record illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. . . . . Mr. Trump has made clear he wants to crack down on immigration in general — both legal and illegal.

According to the rationale laid out in the documents submitted to [the Felon] Mr. Trump, America’s acceptance of refugees has made the country too diverse. “The sharp increase in diversity has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity,” according to one of the documents.

To that end, the documents say, [the Felon] Mr. Trump should cancel the applications of hundreds of thousands of people who are already in the pipeline to come to the United States as refugees, many of whom have gone through extensive security checks and referrals.

And Mr. Trump’s federal agencies proposed imposing limits on the number of refugees who can resettle in communities that already have a high population of immigrants, on the basis that the United States should avoid “the concentration of non-native citizens” in order to promote assimilation.

Critics say the plans exposes the president’s vision for what America should look like. “It reflects a preexisting notion among some in the Trump administration as to who are the true Americans,” said Barbara L. Strack, a former chief of the refugee affairs division at Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Bush and Obama administrations. “And they think it’s white people and they think it’s Christians.”

Other changes include more intensive security vetting for refugees, including DNA tests for children to ensure they are related to the adults they are traveling with.

[The Felon] Mr. Trump also is planning to slash the number of refugees allowed into the United States to 7,500 in the upcoming year, a drastic decrease from the limit of 125,000 set by the Biden administration last year.

Migrants at the border, however, seek protection through a separate program than refugees, who often wait years overseas before they are vetted to travel to the United States. The refugee program has historically received bipartisan support from both Republicans and Democrats.

[The Felon] Mr. Trump and the architect of his immigration restrictions, Stephen Miller, have for years sought to limit the number of refugees entering the United States, particularly from Africa or Muslim-majority nations. During his first term, Mr. Trump demanded to know at a White House meeting why he would accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations, which he described as “shithole countries,” rather than Europe. . . . His administration now appears prepared to turn those sentiments into policy.

But many local leaders and refugee advocates argue that not only can refugees adjust to life in America effectively, they also benefit local economies.

Marian Abernathy, a lay leader at the Judea Reform Congregation synagogue in Durham, N.C., has helped refugees who had settled in her community since 2016, including a dozen families in the last four years from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Haiti, Venezuela and Syria.

The refugees have worked as nursing aides, engineers, Uber drivers, medical technicians and lunch coordinators at local schools, she said. . . . “I’ve rarely seen a group of people,” she said, “who work harder and who want fewer handouts.”

If he could, I suspect the Felon would bring back segregation and the Jim Crow laws.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Young Republican Leaders: Racist, Antisemitic, Homophobic and Misogynistic

The Republican Party that I grew up in ad in which I served as a city committee member for eight years is truly dead and gone. Its demise was ushered in by the ascendancy of the wrongly named "Christian Right" - a group that is anti-knowledge, anti-science, and views lying as a means justified by their end goal - and was supercharged by the rise of the Felon who has destroyed what used to be political norms and welcomed neo-Nazis, bigots, and misogynists like himself into the GOP.  While many in the GOP and worthless mainstream media bloviate about political violence and promote a false equivalency between the right and the left, it is the far right and the Felon as its Fuhrer that are the overwhelming source of political violence and deliberate cruelty as we are witness with ICE and its brutal treatment of undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. The Felon and his regime have sought to normalize what was what deemed reprehensible.  Now, Politico has blown the lid off of just how toxic and nasty many within the young Republican leadership truly is by exposing much of the discourse on what they believed was a safe Telegram chat group.  Here in Virginia Republicans have made much of what Jay Jones said in what he thought was private text, yet Jones' text pale overall with the ugliness exposed within this GOP chat group.  Here are excerpts from Politico's expose piece:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old. “I’m going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers,” he continued.

“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic,” Joe Maligno, who previously identified himself as the general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans, wrote back.

“I’m ready to watch people burn now,” Annie Kaykaty, New York’s national committee member, said.

The exchange is part of a trove of Telegram chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than seven months of messages among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. The chat offers an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.

Since POLITICO began making inquiries, one member of the group chat is no longer employed at their job and another’s job offer was rescinded. Prominent New York Republicans, including Rep. Elise Stefanik and state Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt, have denounced the chat. And festering resentments among Young Republicans have now turned into public recriminations, including allegations of character assassination and extortion.

The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.

“The more the political atmosphere is open and liberating — like it has been with the emergence of Trump and a more right wing GOP even before him — it opens up young people and older people to telling racist jokes, making racist commentaries in private and public,” said Joe Feagin, a Texas A&M sociology professor who has studied racism for the last 60 years. He’s also concerned the words would be applied to public policy. “It’s chilling, of course, because they will act on these views.”

The dynamic of easy racism and casual cruelty played out in often dark, vivid fashion inside the chats, where campaign talk and party gossip blurred into streams of slurs and violent fantasies.

The group chat members spoke freely about the pressure to cow to Trump to avoid being called a RINO, the love of Nazis within their party’s right wing and the president’s alleged work to suppress documents related to wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex crimes.

Giunta claimed the release of the chat is part of “a highly-coordinated year-long character assassination led by Gavin Wax and the New York City Young Republican Club” — an allusion to a once obscured internecine war that has now spilled into the open.

“These logs were sourced by way of extortion and provided to POLITICO by the very same people conspiring against me,” he said. “What’s most disheartening is that, despite my unwavering support of President Trump since 2016, rouge [sic] members of his administration — including Gavin Wax — have participated in this conspiracy to ruin me publicly simply because I challenged them privately.”

Wax, a staffer in Trump’s State Department, formerly led the New York Young Republican Club — a separate, city-based group that is at odds with the state organization, the New York State Young Republicans. He declined to comment.

The private rhetoric isn’t happening in a vacuum. It comes amid a widespread coarsening of the broader political discourse and as incendiary and racially offensive tropes from the right become increasingly common in public debate. Last month, Trump posted an artificial intelligence-generated video that showed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero beside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose fabricated remarks were about trading free health care for immigrant votes — a false, long-running GOP trope.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump spread false reports of Haitian migrants eating pets and, at one of his rallies, welcomed comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and joked about Black people “carving watermelons” on Halloween.

Giunta was the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages — often encouraged or “liked” by other members.

When Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, asked if the New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, Giunta responded, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Giunta elsewhere refers to Black people as “the watermelon people.”

Hendrix made a similar remark in July: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?”

Hendrix was a communications assistant for Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach until Thursday. He also said in the chat that, despite political differences, he’s drawn to Missouri’s Young Republican organization because “Missouri doesn’t like f--s.”

Few minority groups are spared from the Young Republican group’s chat. Their rhetoric — normalized at most points as dark humor — mirrors some popular conservative political commentators, podcasters and comedians amid a national erosion of what’s considered acceptable discourse.

Giunta’s line on a darker-skinned pilot, for example, echoes one used by slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk last year when he said, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” Kirk was discussing how diversity hiring “invites unwholesome thinking.”

Walker also uses the moniker “eyepatch McCain” (originally coined by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson) in an apparent reference to GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw. Crenshaw lost his eye while serving as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan. Walker also makes the remark, “I prefer my war heroes not captured,” a repeat of a similar 2015 line from Trump.

 There's a lot in the chats and it is truly ugly.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Why Putin Isn't Winning

With events currently taking place in the Middle East, ICE's Gestapo like raids and brutality towards undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, the Republican caused U.S. government shutdown, and the every increasing consumer prices thanks to the Felon's tariffs, it is easy for the continuing Russia-Ukraine war to slip from the attention of the always fickle news media and the public consciousness.  Likewise, it is easy to forget that while Putin's Russia continues to commit war crimes against Ukrainian civilians, Russia has failed to make any significant gains in terms of seizing more Ukrainian territory and that Russia has and continues to suffer high levels of casualties. Stated another way, despite the western media's default position that Putin is "winning", Russia is struggling economically and Putin runs the risk of losing public support if living conditions in Russia deteriorate,  not to mention the ongoing proof that the Russian army is not what the West long perceived it to be.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at where things stand currently and the proof that Putin in fact is perhaps treading water rather than winning the war.   Here are article highlights:

Since the beginning of September, Russia has sent dozens of drones into European airspace. In response, NATO governments have briefly shut down civilian airports, scrambled fighter jets, and invoked NATO’s Article 4—calling for formal consultations among allies.

This pattern of incursions is Vladimir Putin’s most overt attempt to show NATO as hollow and unable to defend its own territory, much less Ukraine. But more remarkable than the provocation itself is how confidently observers in the West deemed it a victory for the Russian president. The intrusions had contributed, one CNN analysis asserted, to a level of confusion and distraction that represented a “win for Putin”—yet another instance of his being depicted as enjoying one success after another, regardless of battlefield losses, unfavorable geopolitical shifts, and growing turbulence at home.

After taking over from the ailing Boris Yeltsin a quarter century ago, Putin started his presidency by projecting a near-comical image of manliness and invincibility. But no one in the Kremlin could have imagined how the West would adopt and then amplify this narrative.

Putin, a ruthless septuagenarian bent on restoring Russia to its imperial glory, is simply too good a villain for Western politicians and media commentators to ignore. Casting him as omniscient and unstoppable creates a clear story amid the chaos of global affairs. For Trump’s critics, emphasizing Putin’s strength has become another way of denigrating the U.S. president. But this emotionally convenient mythmaking spills over into news and political analysis.

Early in my career, I worked inside several propaganda outlets in Russia. All had an unspoken rule: No matter the crisis, Putin can’t lose. Many Western commentators are unwittingly following that rule too. But overestimating Putin’s power means doing his job for him. It means amplifying every one of his threats, mistaking posturing for reality, and making policy decisions based not on facts but on what Putin wants us to believe. And although he has had some successes—his annexation of Crimea, to name one—Putin’s biggest win comes from convincing the world that he’s winning, even when he isn’t.

Even before Putin’s plane touched down in Alaska for a meeting with Trump in August, many outlets called the summit a victory for the Russian leader. John Lyons of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation wrote of the Anchorage summit, “This was vintage Putin who spent years studying the art of psychological war and subterfuge as he rose through the ranks of the notorious Soviet intelligence service, the KGB.” But substantively, the summit did not advance Putin’s goals. American weapons are still flowing into Ukraine, and the U.S. will now provide Kyiv with intelligence to strike targets, including energy infrastructure, deep inside Russia—something even Joe Biden once opposed.

Citing unnamed Kremlin officials, Bloomberg reported in late September that Putin, after meeting Trump in Alaska, decided to intensify drone and missile attacks on Ukraine, believing Trump had no interest in intervening in the conflict. But the shift toward civilian attacks was going on long before the summit, and reflects Putin’s growing frustration with his inability to achieve any military goals. The recent drone escalation appears minor compared with the scale of the war that Putin began in 2022, when hundreds of thousands of Russian troops, tanks, and warplanes poured into Ukraine. Today, Russia’s armed forces are bogged down. There are no tanks rolling toward Kyiv, no lightning offensives seizing regions, no major cities under siege. Russia does not have air supremacy, or even superiority, in Ukraine. . . . . far from seizing all of Ukraine, Russia has not even fully conquered the regions that it has written into its constitution.

Meanwhile, Putin has lost influence in his own backyard. Russian peacekeepers stationed in Armenia, a former Soviet republic long aligned with Moscow, stood by in 2023 as it was attacked by neighboring Azerbaijan. The Kremlin didn’t just abandon an ally; it also could no longer reliably enforce stability in the Caucasus, a region it has long considered vital to Russia’s national security. . . . . Now a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been brokered by the United States—not Russia—and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is openly weighing the possibility of supplying Ukraine with lethal aid. Putin was forced to confront the reality of a neighbor slipping from Russia’s orbit.

Although Russia is a militant autocracy, the reason for Putin’s lifetime presidency isn’t gulags, mass executions, or forced labor. It’s a set of deals with the Russian people.

Amid unprecedented economic sanctions imposed by the West, Moscow has mostly managed to preserve the living standards expected in a modern consumer economy: Chinese cars have replaced European ones, domestic tourism is booming, and for the perhaps half a million Russians who received Schengen Area visas this year, even a European vacation is still within reach. . . . And the restaurants, as a friend who recently returned from Russia insisted to me not long ago, “are somehow even better than before.”

But consumer access to vacations, streaming services, and more depends on an economy that is showing clear signs of strain. Herman Gref, the head of Russia’s biggest bank, recently admitted that the country has entered “technical stagnation,” as wartime industrial mobilization has run out of steam. Last week, Reuters reported that Russian Railways, a state-owned company employing about 700,000 people, asked its central-office staff to take three unpaid days off a month. In September, Avtovaz, Russia’s largest carmaker, introduced a four-day workweek in an attempt to cut payroll costs without increasing unemployment.

Putin’s end of the bargain, stability, is becoming elusive, and Russians are seeing palpable changes in their daily life. Amid widespread internet outages, shuttered airports, and gasoline shortages from Ukrainian strikes on oil infrastructure, Russian propaganda outlets are using euphemisms like planned cooling of the economy and ignition of an oil tank to mask what looks like a deepening crisis.

Another rule of Russian propaganda is that if Putin’s not winning, he’s simply out of the picture. It’s one of the reasons Russia’s commander in chief almost never visits the occupied Ukrainian territories. Doing so would remind everyone where his war against Western hegemony really stands: stuck near Pokrovsk, a town with a prewar population of 70,000 that Russia hasn’t managed to take in two years of fighting.

Underestimating Putin is dangerous, but ascribing dark powers to him makes the Russian leader mightier in Western minds than he is in reality. If Americans had a more clear-eyed view of Putin, they would see a dictator who’s bet everything on a failed invasion, a country losing its sphere of influence, and an economy that’s rapidly cooling. A realistic view of his power would strip Putin of his biggest leverage: the perception of his invincibility.

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Pope Leo Takes Aim at MAGA’s False Gospel

Being gay and raised Roman Catholic has meant I have a complicated history with the Church which lead to many years of torment and self-hate until I formally left the Church back when the sex abuse scandal exploded back in the early 2000's. Sadly, the official dogma of the Church still clings to a 12th century understanding of human sex and sexuality which means there remains no place for me in the Church.  That said, despite its many flaws, the Church remains more committed to Christ's gospel message of aiding the poor, the sick and the homeless than much of evangelical Christianity in America, especially now that the latter has morphed completely into a form of self-centered white Christian nationalism that bears little resemblance to what Christ's social gospel called on believers to do as it pushes for new forms of white supremacy and treats non-whites horrifically in many instances, particularly undocumented immigrants. Indeed, lies and hypocrisy have become the hallmarks of MAGA Christianity as it rallies to the standard of an individual who is devoid of redeeming characteristics and who is the embodiment of the seven deadly sins. Enter Pope Leo XIV who is actively calling out the false gospel that permeates the MAGA base.  A piece at Salon looks at Leo's statements that are enraging the hate merchants of the MAGA movement.  Here are highlights:

Even though Pope Leo XIV, the first-ever U.S.-born pontiff, was labeled the “woke pope” soon after he was chosen in May by cardinals to succeed the late Pope Francis, conservatives in the U.S. reportedly held out hope the new pope would abandon the progressivism of his outspoken predecessor. Now, five months into his tenure, the Chicago-born leader of the Catholic Church has angered MAGA-aligned conservatives on multiple fronts, including escalating his pointed criticisms of the Trump administration as it ramps up deportation operations.

“The fact that I am American means, among other things, people can’t say, like they did about Francis, ‘he doesn’t understand the United States, he just doesn’t see what’s going on,’” Leo said in a recent interview. Born Robert Francis Prevost on Chicago’s South Side, the pope reportedly voted in several Republican primaries. But an X account under his name, with tweets going as far back as 2015, previously shared links criticizing Trump’s approach to immigration and hinting at other political views, such as stricter gun control laws. “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed?” he apparently posted in 2024, criticizing Trump’s meeting with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele about deportation collaboration. In recent weeks, Leo has started to aim his criticisms directly at Trump’s regime, like the more aggressive posture sought by Secretary Pete Hegseth. “This wording, like going from minister of defense to minister of war — let’s hope it’s just a figure of speech,” he recently said in Italian. 

He named himself after Pope Leo XIII, who led the Catholic Church from 1878 to 1903, and was known as “The Pope of the Workers,” making it his mission to confront the ruthless laissez-faire economics of the era. During an interview with Crux, a Catholic news site, Leo XIV zeroed in on “some things going on in the (United) States that are of concern” in our current era, and suggested that “sometimes decisions are made more based on economics than on human dignity and human support.”

He got more specific in his Oct. 5 homily during the Holy Mass for the Jubilee of the Missions and of Migrants. Leo told a crowd of more than 10,000 people gathered in front of St. Peter’s Basilica that “in the communities of ancient Christian tradition, such as those of the West, the presence of many brothers and sisters from the world’s South should be welcomed as an opportunity, through an exchange that renews the face of the Church and sustains a Christianity that is more open, more alive and more dynamic.” He followed the sermon with a post on X that same day: “No one should be forced to flee, nor exploited or mistreated because of their situation as foreigners or people in need! Human dignity must always come first!” 

Before being named pope, Leo reposted an article headlined, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”  . . . . A Catholic convert, Vance told Fox News that “there is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” 

“Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” the future Pope Leo said in response, calling the vice president “wrong.”

Needless to say, MAGA was already unhappy about the elevation of an American pope before he ever spoke out in an official capacity. Calling his selection “shocking,” former White House strategist Steve Bannon said Leo was the “worst pick for MAGA Catholics.” Right-wing agitator Laura Loomer immediately labeled Leo “Anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.” The late Charlie Kirk suggested Leo was an “open borders globalist installed to counter Trump.”

In an “Apostolic Exhortation” titled “Dilexi te” — which translates to “I have loved you” — the 40-page text, the pope said, was first started by Francis, but is ultimately his work. With its focus on what he labeled a “dictatorship” of wealth inequality, the document was seen by some on the right as confirmation of Leo’s condemnation of American conservatism.

“God has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favor of the weakest,” Leo wrote. “Thus, in a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people.”

One week after Trump claimed that climate change was a “con job” during an address at the United Nations General Assembly, Leo said that he hoped the Vatican conference would get leaders to “listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor.”

Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion’ but says ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life. Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in favor of the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States’—I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

To MAGA’s dismay, now that Leo has begun expressing his views, there is little indication he plans to rein them in. The first American pope “was very clear that what is happening to migrants in the United States right now is an injustice,” Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Texas-based Hope Border Institute, who attended Leo’s meeting with Seitz, told the Post. “He said the church cannot remain silent.”

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State Terror, American Style

One of the hallmarks of the Felon and his monstrous regime is the use of constant lies to justify illegal actions and outright cruelty, especially against non-whites. The Felon continues to claim the nation is plagued with left-wing terrorism when in fact the majority of domestic terrorism is perpetrated by right-wing actors.  Undocumented migrants are seized and made to disappear on the pretense that they are violent criminals when in fact the vast majority are guilty of nothing other than their undocumented status.  The same undocumented individuals are accused of living off welfare and use of Medicaid yet many of the detention actions by ICE are raiding workplaces where the supposed freeloaders are at work. Fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela have been destroyed killing all on board on the pretense they are smuggling drugs yet no evidence is provided to document that smuggling was actually occurring.  Perhaps the most dangerous lie is that "antifa" is a terrorist organization when, in fact, no organization exists and the term used correctly means those who oppose fascism, The promotion of this lies means that anyone who opposes the Felon and his horrible henchmen and women - think Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi (who should be disbarred) to name a few - can be labeled a terrorist and arrest and subjected to abuse.  A piece at Substack looks at the terror being unleashed by the the Felon:

Over the weekend I talked to a couple of people, people who generally try to keep abreast of the news, about the Chicago apartment raid last Tuesday — and discovered that they hadn’t heard about it. And that’s extremely worrying. It suggests that many people don’t realize how fast and aggressively the Trump administration is moving to end rule of law and convert America into a full-fledged autocracy.

About that raid: It was reported in mainstream media, but didn’t get the screaming banner headlines it deserved. Here’s what happened, according to Reuters:

U.S. Border Patrol agents deployed to Chicago led a late-night raid on an apartment building this week, rappelling from helicopters onto rooftops and breaking down doors in an operation authorities said targeted gang members but which swept up U.S. citizens and families.…

As part of the raid, some U.S. citizens were temporarily detained and children pulled from their beds, according to interviews with residents and news reports. Building hallways were still littered with debris two days later.…

Hundreds of agents swarmed the apartment building during the raid on Tuesday, including some rappelling down to the roof from Black Hawk helicopters, according to NewsNation.…

One resident, who asked not to be named, reported being made to lie down on the ground by agents during the raid and having his hands zip-tied.

ICE claimed that the building was targeted because it was “known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua (a Venezuelan gang) members and their associates” — that is, although ICE carried out the raid, it was supposedly about crime. And they arrested two suspected gang members, while also rounding up some undocumented immigrants. But they detained everyone in the building, smashed their doors, zip-tied their children, and ransacked their homes.

This was a wildly disproportionate and illegal response, even if the raid had actually had anything to do with crime.

But none of what the Trump administration is doing in Chicago has anything to do with fighting crime. Chicago has more violent crime than, say, New York or Los Angeles, but the post-Covid bump in crime has completely receded. City officials report that this past summer had the fewest homicides in 60 years. If we’d seen this kind of decline in crime after the Trump administration began flooding Chicago with ICE agents, rather than before, they’d be touting these results as complete vindication.

But as I said, this isn’t about crime. It’s about paranoid conspiracy theories and an attempt to dismantle democracy.

The truth is that left-wing terrorist attacks and plots are very rare in this country. There have been more this year than in the previous two years, but the number is still tiny, and is normally dwarfed by right-wing terrorism . . .

What is true is that right-wing terrorism is way down this year, possibly because potential terrorists don’t feel the need to act when the Trump administration is doing it for them. Some people who might have engaged in terrorist assaults may well be working for ICE instead.

My guess is that Donald Trump actually believes that Portland is a war zone, that residents of big blue cities are afraid to leave their apartments. But [Stephen] Miller almost surely knows better. He just has a different definition of terrorism: For him, it means any kind of opposition to his racist, authoritarian agenda.

If you’ve looked at footage from Portland, you know that the “relentless terrorist assaults” on ICE officers consist mainly of people yelling at them. But in Miller’s eyes that’s a hate crime.

What do we learn from the Chicago apartment raid plus the growing number of incidents in which ICE agents have physically attacked people who posed no conceivable threat? To me, it says that even “alarmists” who warned about the threat a Trump administration would pose to democracy underestimated just how evil this administration would be.

Until recently, most warnings about the decline of democracy envisaged a scenario something like Hungary’s “soft autocracy”: Subversion of institutions from the media to the courts, rigged elections, crony capitalism that favors regime supporters, and so on. We didn’t expect America to become a country where masked secret policemen smash down your door in the middle of the night and take you away. Yet that’s where we are.

And don’t expect the attacks to be limited to immigrants. A recent White House memo directs the FBI to investigate groups as potential domestic terrorists based on incredibly expansive criteria, including “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Christianity” views. This would basically empower going after any kind of dissent.

One reason things have gotten so extreme, so fast may be that Trump, Miller and company are in a race against time. Foreign autocrats like Orban or Vladimir Putin could afford to chip away gradually at the foundations of democracy because they were, at least initially, quite popular. Trump — although he won’t admit it — has very low approval, and the public opposes him on every major issue. Yet he and his minions control much of the machinery of government, and are trying to use it to intimidate — you might say terrorize — their opponents before public anger catches up with them.

Moreover, Miller and Tom “Cava bag” Homan clearly like inflicting suffering.

What all this suggests to me is that there will be many more incidents as bad or worse than the Chicago apartment raid. If you think I’m overreacting, remember: The alarmists have been right about Trump every step of the way.

So what can people and institutions do? Resist. Don’t make concessions in the hope of buying MAGA off. Don’t mute your criticisms in an attempt to seem even-handed. As far as I know, no wannabe autocrat has managed to consolidate power while being as unpopular as Trump is right now. Don’t help him become the first to pull it off.

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