This is another act of war committed by the US on a sovereign country. What tRump is doing attacking boats and seizing tankers now doing land attacks is no difference from what Putin / Russia is doing to Ukraine. Plus only congress can authorize a war, not tRump. tRump is very honest as to why he is committing war crimes, he wants the oil for US companies and to get it he needs Maduro to leave office. The oil belongs to Venezuela and its people / government. It is not US oil nor US land. tRump is being a total school yard bully in that he attacks a smaller country that can’t fight back well while completely giving in to Putin who he fears. Hugs
The administration provided no details of what the president said was an attack last week linked to U.S. efforts to disrupt drug trafficking from Latin America.
Such an attack would be the first on land since President Trump began his military campaign against Venezuela.Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
President Trump said in a radio interview that the United States had knocked out “a big facility” last week as part of his administration’s campaign against Venezuela, an apparent reference to an American attack on a drug trafficking site.
American officials said that Mr. Trump was referring to a drug facility in Venezuela and that it was eliminated, but provided no details. Military officials said they had no information to share, and the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment. The White House declined to comment.
Mr. Trump made his statement on Friday during an interview with John Catsimatidis, the Republican billionaire and supporter of the president who owns the WABC radio station in New York. The two men were discussing the U.S. military campaign to disrupt drug trafficking from Latin America by striking boats suspected of carrying narcotics.
“They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Mr. Trump said, without saying where it was or explicitly identifying Venezuela as the target. “Two nights ago we knocked that out.”
Asked about the incident on Monday, Mr. Trump declined to say how the attack had been carried out or by whom but said it was along a shoreline.
“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” he told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Florida. “They load the boats up with drugs. So we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area. It’s the implementation area, that’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”
The attack appears to be the first known to have been carried out on land since he began his military campaign against Venezuela. U.S. officials declined to specify anything about the site the president said was hit, where it was located, how the attack was carried out or what role the facility played in drug trafficking. There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government or any other authorities in the region.
While some officials called the facility struck a drug production site, it is not clear what role in narcotics trafficking the facility would have played. Venezuela is well known for its role in trafficking drugs, especially cocaine produced in Colombia, but has not been a major producer of narcotics.
Mr. Trump has been promising strikes on land in Venezuela for weeks, part of an intensifying pressure campaign on Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, who is under indictment in the United States for his role in the drug trade.
Mr. Trump authorized the C.I.A. to begin planning covert operations inside Venezuela months ago.
The United States has been conducting military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September. The administration maintains that the vessels are transporting cocaine. The operations have killed at least 105 people so far, and have been called extrajudicial killings by critics who say the U.S. military has no legal basis for lethal strikes against civilians. The administration has defended the attacks by asserting that the United States is in a conflict with what it calls narco-terrorists who can only be stopped with military force.
Those boat strikes were originally developed as part of a two-phase operation. The second phase, which has yet to be officially announced, was to include strikes on drug facilities in Venezuela, people familiar with the planning have said.
Since beginning the strikes, Mr. Trump has announced what he has called a blockade of Venezuela as the United States has begun trying to intercept oil tankers, cutting off a vital source of income for the Maduro government.
Exactly what operations Mr. Trump had in mind for the C.I.A. were not clear, but they could include both sabotage operations and psychological operations meant to prod Mr. Maduro into making some mistake.
Eric Schmitt, Edward Wong and Maria Abi-Habib contributed reporting.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
This is entirely about white grievance and the loss of automatic white privilege. These people believe any white person is better than any black person and they do not want people of color to rise in any company or corporation past basic level worker. They have had white privilege for so long that equality seems like oppression to them. They do not want a country where everyone is equal and all have the same rights. They are demanding a return to a white male dominated society that gave automatic superiority to white people. They also don’t want women or the LGBTQ+ to have rights or be fairly treated in the work force. Hugs
A sign on the wall of the U.S. Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 14, 2025. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
The Trump administration has launched investigations into the use of diversity initiatives in hiring and promotion at major U.S. companies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Verizon (VZ.N), opens new tab are among a list of companies that have received Justice Department demands for documents and information about their workplace programs, the report said, citing people familiar with the investigations.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Verizon, Google, and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
The probes are being conducted under the False Claims Act, the report said, adding that companies under scrutiny include sectors like automotive, pharmaceuticals, defense, and utilities, and some have met in person with Justice Department officials.
The False Claims Act is a federal civil law that allows the government to recover funds lost due to fraud.
President Donald Trump moved quickly after taking office in January to eradicate federal DEI programs and discourage them in the private sector and education, including by directing the firing of diversity officers at federal agencies and pulling grant funding for a wide range of programs
Reporting by Mihika Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Ronojoy Mazumdar and Rashmi Aich
ICE agents violently restrained a woman in Minneapolis on Monday, dragging her through the snow and pinning her face down as onlookers shouted that the woman was pregnant.
During what was supposed to be a “targeted vehicle stop,” according to ICE officials, protesters swarmed the agents. Esme Murphy, a WCCO reporter, was on the scene, where she saw ICE holding a woman on the ground.
“Please let her go! She’s pregnant!” one onlooker shouted.
“Get her off of her fucking stomach,” another said.
In response to this, one agent fired a Taser into the crowd. “Who wants more?” he taunted, according to WCCO.
“We kept yelling, ‘She is pregnant, she’s pregnant,’” resident Tonika Deutch told Murphy. “They put their knees on her. We kept telling them, ‘She can’t breathe, let her up, let her up.’”
The woman was then dragged by one arm, as the crowd continued to yell and plead with the ICE agents. Bystanders threw snowballs, and ICE agents fired pepper spray into the crowd—hitting Murphy, the reporter, as well as her photographer.
ICE called the Minneapolis Police Department for backup. Once they arrived, the officers determined there was “no violence occurring” against the agents. “We have been training our officers for the last five years very, very intensely on de-escalation, but unfortunately that is … often not what we are seeing from other agencies in the city,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told WCCO.
According to ICE, they succeeded in arresting the targets of their operation: a young Ecuadorian couple who were abducted from their car, its windows shattered by agents. The woman is currently in custody in Illinois, and it’s not known where her husband is being held. Two U.S. citizens were also arrested for assaulting federal officers, according to CBS.
This is a full analysis of much of the reportage we receive all the time. Dr. Hogan has plenty of time to research, compare, let drafts marinate, and especially, to verify. It’s quite a long read, and while I so wish to put it all here, it’s too long for a blog post. It is highly informational, and it can really help a person trying to suss out news without being emotional or overwhelmed. So, here is part of Dr. Hogan’s Substack column. There is one outlet named, but they are not the only outlet included; he names Meidas Touch Network. They are not the only ones, nor are they by any stretch of imagination the worst, and I was gratified to find I am not the only one who’s noticed changes with MTN’s presentations! Anyway, here’s a snippet with the link & title just below. Read or not, up to you; thanks for your attention to this vital issue! 🙂
Throughout this publication, I speak only of the American acronym MTN, known publicly as MeidasTouchNetwork. I do so deliberately: the letters MTN already belong to a continental giant — Africa’s and Middle Eastern’s great signal‑bearer — a network‑mountain whose reach spans nations and whose currents carry nearly 300 million voices across the horizon.
To avoid confusing these two mountains, I name only the American one.
This work maintains that platforms such as Substack, YouTube, X, and TikTok are not built to honour verification:
They are engines calibrated for velocity, for heat, for the clean lines of ideological contrast. Within such machinery, truth becomes a faint watermark — present, but always subordinate to the algorithm’s appetite for motion.
In this environment, journalism becomes indistinguishable from:
political branding
influencer performance
affective storytelling
partisan mobilization
I MTN as the exemplar because its signal is a typographic monolith — a glyph large enough to be seen across continents. I intend no diminishment of it. What I observe is that MTN emerges inside an epistemic script already dissolving at the edges. It is not a transgressor of journalistic form; it is written into a page where the old rules have faded from the margins.
CHAPTER I:
THE PARTISAN SENSORIUM: MEDIA, AFFECT, AND THE NEW POLITICAL SUBJECT
The Return of the Affective State
Every era produces its own political subject. The Enlightenment imagined a rational citizen; the industrial age imagined a disciplined worker; the broadcast era imagined a passive viewer. The digital age, however, has produced something different: a subject constituted through affective immediacy, algorithmic visibility, and continuous political stimulation.
This chapter introduces the concept of the partisan sensorium — the affective infrastructure through which contemporary political subjects perceive, interpret, and emotionally inhabit the world. It is within this sensorium that organizations like MeidasTouch emerge, thrive, and fail.
The partisan sensorium is not simply a media environment; it is a mode of being.
(snip-there is more on the page. He’s very kindly outlined his work, so it’s very organized. Do take a few minutes and look it over!)
More tRump stupidity / tRump putting his branding everywhere / is he the president or chief architect / Fluffing tRump’s ego / tRump’s grifting / tRump’s lies & misinformation
That’s $100,000/head. tRump doesn’t care as he spends the taxpayers money / countries treasury like a drunk spending other peoples money. He is a tryant in that he thiinks that money is his todo what he wants even though the law states that only congress controls spending. This is human traficing plain and simple. Hugs
In September 2025, Turner’s agency sponsored a far-right anti-LGBTQ extremist to lead a massive Christian nationalist rally on Washington DC’s National Mall, the first-ever such event formally sanctioned by the federal government.
In June, it was reported that Turner is moving to take over the former National Science Foundation building as his agency’s headquarters, where he has demanded a full-floor executive suite, a private dining room, and parking for his five personal cars.
It is not lost on me that the above story is a woman with a career telling other woman they need to be stay at home mothers / trad wives to please a man because of religious dogma. Hugs
Yarborough appeared here last month for his bill that would ban Pride flags at government buildings, including public schools.
He appeared here in April 2025 for his bill that would ban thousands of books, including classic novels, over sexual content.
Yarborough appeared here March 2025 for his bill that would ban civil rights ordinances enacted by cities and counties, including, presumably, LGBTQ protections.
He first appeared on JMG in 2010, when as a member of the Jacksonville City Council he declared that gays, Muslims, and atheists should not be permitted to hold public office, otherwise God will smite the country.
In April 2023, lawmakers approved Yarborough’s ban on drag shows before minors. Yarborough is also the author several anti-trans bills.
Borrero appeared here in 2023 for a ban on Pride flags that died in committee. He tried again last year, but that attempt died after passage in its first committee hearing.
Borerro first appeared on JMG in January 2022 for his successful bill mandating that Florida public schools recognize an annual “Victims Of Communism Day.”
Oltmann appeared here last year when he called for executing Joe Biden, adding, “I want to send the mainstream media to the gallows, radical leftists to the gallows, traitors to our nation to the gallows, and they all kind of fit in the same bucket.”
In 2022, he appeared here when he announced that he would lead a “well-armed action” to install Kari Lake as governor of Arizona.
In 2021, he appeared here when he called for executing the 19 Republican Senators who voted to avert a government shutdown.
After spending this year working to implement as much of its gargantuan right-wing policy agenda, Project 2025, as possible, the Heritage Foundation has unveiled its anti-LGBTQ+ goals for 2026.
Over the past month, the far-right think tank has been preparing for next year, releasing an ad campaign and doing multiple interviews about its plans. The activity has brought renewed attention on Heritage Foundation’s 2025-2026 policy priorities, which were titled “Restoring America’s Promise” when they were released in March. At the time, the group named nine key priorities, including “root[ing] out the deep state” and “counter[ing] the CCP [Chinese Communist Party].”
The bulk of its anti-LGBTQ+ goals lie in the priority titled “Put Family First,” in which the Heritage Foundation declares that “every child conceived deserves to be born to a married mother and father who will love, guide, and protect them throughout their lives.”
The organization goes on to claim that “family breakdown and rampant abortion tears at the soul of our country and saps it of strength and moral authority,” while “radical ideologies that deny social and biological truths about sexual embodiment, marriage, and unborn life poison our courts, our culture, and our laws.”
“The Heritage enterprise will advance policies at the state and federal level to restore the nuclear family to the center of American life and to reduce both the demand and supply for abortion at all stages of human development,” it concludes. This language appears to oppose same-sex marriage given its emphasis on children being born to a married father and mother. It also appears to oppose transgender identity given its condemnation of ideologies that “deny social and biological truths about sexual embodiment” — this falls inline with a longstanding Heritage Foundation fight against trans people.
Elsewhere, the Heritage Foundation indicates its anti-trans views in a priority titled “Expand Education Freedom,” in which the group declares that the education system is “failing our children” through “the scourge of woke ideas like critical theory and radical gender ideology.” The terminology “radical gender ideology” is often used by conservatives to refer to trans and nonbinary identities.
The Heritage Foundation has been around since 1973, when it was founded by conservatives who found President Richard Nixon too liberal and feared both fiscal liberalism and federal government expansion. It has been consistent in its campaigns against LGBTQ+ rights, from consulting with then-governor Mitt Romney to figure out ways around preventing the legalization of gay marriage from being implemented in Massachusetts to lobbying against Title IX protections for trans students implemented during the Obama administration.
More recently, the organization has made headlines for its 920-page policy blueprint Project 2025, which presents a far-right Christian vision for the second Trump administration that includes several anti-trans measures, as well as the dismantling of the Department of Education and undoing other federal checks and balances. Although the Heritage Foundation has been releasing regular “Mandate for Leadership” blueprints ahead of incoming presidential administrations since the 1980s, Project 2025 has received considerable attention given that the group staffed and advised the first Trump administration (in July 2024, a CNN review found that at least 140 people working for Trump were involved with the Heritage Foundation). One of Project 2025’s architects, Russell Vought, currently runs the Office of Management and Budget.
Following late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary removal in September, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr seemingly confirmed speculation that the Trump administration’s actions are a part of Project 2025. At the time, Glee star Kevin McHale shared an X post stating that “This was all in Project 2025,” after reposting another X post that framed right-wing attacks on media — which also include the Trump administration’s lawsuit against 60 Minutes, The New York Times, and Wall Street Journal — as First Amendment assaults. In response, Carr — who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC — shared a GIF of Jack Nicholson nodding in apparent confirmation.
Trump has retaliated against Colorado Gov. Jared Polis by denying FEMA reliefs for floods and wildfires and by ordering the dismantling of the nation’s premiere climate research facility.
tRump bribes / Fascism / Right wing media take over /
Mr. Trump has privately said Larry Ellison assured him that he would turn CBS News, which the Ellisons took over when they bought Paramount, into a more conservative outlet, two people with knowledge of the president’s comments said.
What Trump means is that he has to confer with his master in Moscow first.
Hate / DEI / Bigotry / Christians trying to take over the US / Christians forcing their church doctrines on all / Using the US might to enforce the Christian view / ICE / DHS
Earlier this month it was reported that Mahmoud, who remains jailed without bond, may present a “gay panic” defense, which is legal in Florida but banned in 20 states and Washington DC.
Government officials have traditionally steered clear of such overtly religious language, as the Constitution bans an official state religion. The First Amendment’s establishment clause prohibits the government from establishing a religion or favoring one religion over another, while the free exercise clause protects the religious expression of all faiths.
Earlier this month, members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee — whom Kennedy selected after firing the previous group — suggested digging into concerns about aluminum salts, though large studies have found them to be safe.
For me, considering going through the adoption process as an adult is about having the right to configure my family the way that’s best for me—a right we should all have.
The word adoption is synonymous with babies and expectant parents, joy and dreams come true. For most, it’s about families becoming complete and children becoming a permanent part of a legally recognized household.
My story is more complicated.
Recently, I found myself in the atypical and unexpected position of discussing adult adoption with the woman who became my roommate two-and-a-half years ago when I desperately needed a safe place to collapse and recover from a lifetime of trauma. We were strangers who became fast family; she was the perfect big sister and, after understandable initial trepidation about opening her home to a stranger, her extended family and friends have become my family and friends.
Last year my childhood stocking hung on the fireplace and there were gifts under the tree for me—the first time I’ve had a family Christmas since my adopted mother decided I was gay and told me not to come home for the holidays in December 2011.
It hadn’t always been that way. Growing up, my adoptive parents would tell me the bedtime story about how I was wanted, desperately, for the ten years they waited for me. They loved me before they even knew me. While I still believe the sentiment to be true, I have learned over the past 38 years that loving someone does not a healthy environment or nurturing relationship make.
It’s also become clear to me that the caregiving contract between parents and children hardly ends at age 18—especially at a time when we are watching our social safety net be dismantled piece by piece—and it flows in two directions. Unless you are in a family with wealth and security spanning generations, concern about whether the kids will be able to land a good enough job (or jobs, let’s be frank) to support themselves and whether parents and grandparents will have enough in their retirement for their elder care has only increased over the past few decades. (snip-go read it, it’s great info)
The daughter of Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz didn’t start posting until after the 2024 election—and she’s starting to become a leading young political voice.
Hope Walz had no intention of becoming a social media sensation when she first whipped out her phone to shoot a video with her brother, Gus. A few months ago, the Walz siblings—children of former Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz—were headed back to their home state of Minnesota. Their father and his running mate, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, had just lost the 2024 presidential election. And Hope Walz wanted to post an update.
From the front seat of a car, the pair described what it was like to drive without a Secret Service detail for the first time in months.
“We’re finally free,” Gus said from the driver’s seat.
“I would not describe it like that,” Hope replied. “It is a little weird, but it does feel freeing.”
“We’re going to be okay everyone,” she added, before posting the video to TikTok.
After spending months on the campaign trail with her dad, and watching Donald Trump and JD Vance clinch the White House, Walz was ready to return to her everyday life in Montana, where she’d settled after graduating college in 2023. Instead, the video she posted in the aftermath of the election quickly amassed more than 400,000 views. And her next video, breaking down her post-election thoughts, garnered 1 million. Now, Walz is navigating her newfound public platform while trying to map out a future career in public service—a decision inspired by her time on the campaign. (snip-go read the rest of this one, too!)
Tom Williams/Getty Images
After spending this year working to implement as much of its gargantuan right-wing policy agenda, Project 2025, as possible, the Heritage Foundation has unveiled its anti-LGBTQ+ goals for 2026.Over the past month, the far-right think tank has been preparing for next year, releasing an ad campaign and doing multiple interviews about its plans. The activity has brought renewed attention on Heritage Foundation’s 2025-2026 policy priorities, which were titled “Restoring America’s Promise” when they were released in March. At the time, the group named nine key priorities, including “root[ing] out the deep state” and “counter[ing] the CCP [Chinese Communist Party].”
Scottie's Playtime 