Why I do these posts. This is three days of Joe My God that got away way from me. So why do I do these long news posts? Because I comb the Joe My God comment section for the best memes and snarkiest comments. It dawned on me I could post his news articles for those that want to read them. But three days is a lot to go throw and it is much easier just to quickly scan and snatch the comments rather than post them. So I need some inputs from everyone. Are these posts worth it? Or would you rather go to Joe My God yourselves. Or I can keep doing these. Up to you. Hugs
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tRumps Grifts / Scams / Ripping off the rubes / tRump’s ego / tRump’s Crimes / tRump’s health / Republican grifts & payouts for supporting tRump / other trump scammers
The Trump Golf Tracker estimates that the president’s golf trips have cost taxpayers some $110,600,000 so far in 2025. But that estimate, which was based on a 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on four golf trips during his first term, doesn’t even take into account the month of December.
The right wing media / the media arms of the GOP & Republican Party / The over the top thuggery and complete disrespect for common decency / Ask if you would like your child to act this way …. because maga does want their kids to be this crass as it makes them feel good / Kennedy Center debacle
The video was shared by Vice President JD Vance. FBI director Kash Patel said he is aware of the video and the FBI is investigating. The YouTuber says he is uncovering new fraud in Minnesota, but media outlets like KSTP reported more than a year ago about more than 62 investigations into Minnesota child care centers.
What this is really about is they are afraid Walz will run for office and win as he is so well liked. They are trying to gin up a fake scandal to Benghazi him like they did with Hillary Clinton. I posted yesterday how fake and full of lies / misinformation the “report” the YouTuber did was. In the article above this one you can see how the Republican Party had a hand in helping the right wing influencer to push a fake story. The state has been investigating these things for several years. Hugs
$175 billion for a “golden dome” that experts doubt would actually work, but only $2 billion in humanitarian aid for the United Nations. It’s what Jesus would want.
Space based weapons are forbidden by treaties that the US signed. That said do we have space based weapons … well I was sending commands somewhere for something when I was in the Army Sat coms / intel unit. You decide. Hugs
Maga hate fail / tRump lost in court / tRump supporters doing what they do not want you to know about / ICE lies / tRump’s DOJ / Misinformation / Trying to change history by spewing & omitting facts or what really happened
The emails, which were made public as part of a newly unsealed judicial order, largely reflected communications about the case that Robert E. McGuire, the acting U.S. attorney in Nashville, had with members of his staff and with Aakash Singh, a top official in Mr. Blanche’s office. They raised serious questions about whether the Justice Department had misled Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., who is overseeing the case, by telling him that local prosecutors had acted alone in charging Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Hate / Bigotry / DEI / White Supremacy / Christian Nationalism / US aid to only white countries or white dominated areas / US Healthcare / For Profit drug prices rip off the US public /
The civil probes are proceeding under the umbrella of the False Claims Act, which has traditionally been used to go after contractors who bill the government for work that was never performed or inflate the cost of services rendered.
The U.S. slashed its aid spending this year, and leading Western donors such as Germany also pared back assistance as they pivoted to increased defense spending, triggering a severe funding crunch for the United Nations.
U.N. data shows total U.S. humanitarian contributions to the U.N. fell to about $3.38 billion in 2025, equating to about 14.8% of the global sum. This was down sharply from $14.1 billion the prior year, and a peak of $17.2 billion in 2022.
The idea behind the legislation originated with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that has gained prominence for its work to incorporate religion in public spaces.
West last appeared here for his bill that would create a database of abortion patients.
In 2024, we heard from West for his bill to ban Pride flags at public schools and government buildings.
He appeared here in 2023 for his bill that would make it a felony to perform drag in the view of minors. His bill called for a $20,000 fine and up to two years in prison.
West first appeared here in 2021 when Gov. Kevin Stitt signed his bill making it legal to run over protesters.
The tweet below refers to West’s attempt to pass this same bill earlier this year.
tRump’s attack on Colorado because they won’t bow to the whim of the tyrant. His withholding money is illegal but no republican will stand up to the demented king.
One of the things that shocked me when I started following politics was how racist so many of the republican party members are and to be honest a few democrats as well. They finally drove Steve King out due to his over the top hate for black people and constant promotion of whites as the only salvation for the country. But I saw this in Reagan in the 1980s and it has gotten much worse. So many openly racist people are now in the US congress and they are not just men; at least one is a woman from the south who openly hates Black people. First let me be clear, I have heard the arguments made up by white supremacists with their false made up claims, but when I got the chance to work with people of a different skin tone I found two things. One was there was no difference between us in mental ability or the way we did our jobs, and second … Sorry but some of the nonwhite guys I knew were hot and made me horny as hell. Now having said that I of course respected everyone’s boundaries, and I won’t say if I had a few interesting 4 day passes with persons of a different skin tone than mine. But just say I did I can honestly report the melanin in their skin did not change their reactions or our pleasures on those passes … if they happened. OK, yes, they did and I loved it. So did they. But you get my point. The only difference between them and me at that age in that situation was our skin color and I saw how soft bigotry worked. Two young white guys going into a motel in South Carolina raised no eye browes, but when I went to that same hotel with a dark skinned companion, we had to show our military IDs, give my license plate information, and plenty of other things. That was my go to place because they had a nearby amusement park which we could pretend was what we were there for … not the hot sex happening in the hotel room. So even then racism was real in the 1980s and every time it happened I saw the person I was with shrink a bit more inside themselves. Something I understood as an abused child. We really need to do more to fight it. Hugs
The delusion is in MAGA supporters still believing Trump is some anti-elite “drain the swamp” champion for the working class—when, in reality, his inauguration featured the world’s richest billionaires (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and others with over $1 trillion in combined wealth) seated prominently behind him on the platform, grinning like they own the place. It was a blatant display of oligarchy, not populism.
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.
The United States is offering Ukraine security guarantees for a period of 15 years as part of a proposed peace plan, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday, though he said he would prefer an American commitment of up to 50 years to deter Russia from further attempts to seize its neighbor’s land by force.
U.S. President Donald Trump hosted Zelenskyy at his Florida resort on Sunday and insisted that Ukraine and Russia are “closer than ever before” to a peace settlement.
Negotiators are still searching for a breakthrough on key issues, however, including whose forces withdraw from where in Ukraine and the fate of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, one of the 10 biggest in the world. Trump noted that the months long U.S.-led negotiations could still collapse.
“Without security guarantees, realistically, this war will not end,” Zelenskyy told reporters in voice messages responding to questions sent via a WhatsApp chat.
Ukraine has been fighting Russia since 2014, when it illegally annexed Crimea and Moscow-backed separatists took up arms in the Donbas, a vital industrial region in eastern Ukraine.
Details of the security guarantees have not become public, but Zelenskyy said Monday they include how a peace deal would be monitored as well as the “presence” of partners. He didn’t elaborate, but Russia has said it won’t accept the deployment in Ukraine of troops from NATO countries.
Trump and Putin discuss peace efforts by phone
Trump on Monday had “a positive call” with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X. The two leaders had also spoken shortly before Trump’s talks with Zelenskyy on Sunday as the American president tries to steer the countries toward a settlement.
Later, to reporters, the U.S. president similarly characterized the call as “a very good talk” and said “we have a few very thorny issues, as you can imagine” in the negotiations to end the war.
“If we get them resolved, you’re going to have peace,” he added.
Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said Trump is pushing Ukraine to seek a comprehensive peace agreement and not demand a temporary respite for its military through a ceasefire. Putin has insisted on a full settlement before any truce.
In Monday’s call, Putin told Trump that Ukraine attempted to attack the Russian leader’s residence in northwestern Russia with long-range drones almost immediately after Trump’s Sunday talks with Zelenskyy.
The attack “certainly will not be left without a serious response,” Ushakov said, adding that Moscow will now review its negotiating position.
Zelenskyy denied the Russian claim of an attack, describing it as an attempt to manipulate the peace process. He said it was “another lie” and came about because Moscow is unnerved by progress in peace efforts.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Ukraine launched an attack on Putin’s residence in the Novgorod region overnight from Sunday to Monday using 91 long-range drones.
“I don’t like it. It’s not good,” Trump said of the alleged attack on Putin’s home, confirming the Russian leader informed him of it during their call Monday morning.
Russia claims its forces are advancing
As indications suggest negotiations could come to a head in January, before the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin on Monday claimed that Russian troops are advancing in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine and are also pressing their offensive in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.
Putin has sought to portray himself as negotiating from a position of strength as Ukrainian forces strain to keep back the bigger Russian army.
He emphasized at a meeting with senior military officers the need to create military buffer zones along the Russian border. “This is a very important task as it ensures the security of Russia’s border regions,” Putin said.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Kyiv’s allies will meet in Paris in early January to “finalize each country’s concrete contributions” to the security guarantees.
Trump said he would consider extending U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine beyond 15 years, according to Zelenskyy. The guarantees would be approved by the U.S. Congress as well as by parliaments in other countries involved in overseeing any settlement, he said.
Zelenskyy said he wants the 20-point peace plan under discussion to be approved by Ukrainians in a national referendum.
However, holding a ballot requires a ceasefire of at least 60 days, and Moscow has shown no willingness for a truce without a full settlement.
Ukrainians doubt Putin’s sincerity
On the snowy streets of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, people were skeptical about the chances of peace.
One military veteran who uses the call sign Sensei, in keeping with the rules of the Ukrainian military, said Putin’s record in power shows he can’t be trusted. Sensei joined the military in 2022 and was wounded that year during the battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. Now, he said, almost nobody from his company is still alive.
“But all these sacrifices, they are not in vain, because we need to prove … that we exist, that we are, that we have the right to our existence, to our territory, to our culture, to our language,” the 65-year-old veteran told The Associated Press.
Denys Shpylovyi, a 20-year-old student who was home for the holidays, said Trump’s willingness to accept Putin’s arguments has put Zelenskyy in a difficult situation.
“But I’m thankful for some progress. They are speaking, and maybe someday there will be hope,” he said.
Oleh Saakian, a Ukrainian political scientist, said it was a good sign that Zelenskyy is managing to build a relationship with Trump, although he noted that “nothing has been adopted yet, nothing has been signed yet.”
“I don’t see these negotiations bringing us closer to real peace, because they are based on equality between the aggressor and the victim, they are based on complete disregard for international law, and … disregard for European security,” he said.
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Associated Press journalists Seung Min Kim in Washington, and Vasilisa Stepanenko and Volodymr Yurchuk in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.
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.
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Scottie's Playtime 