A useful glossary for 2025.
Sep. 28th, 2025 10:02 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

A useful glossary for 2025.
CNN host Jake Tapper pressed House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) after he suggested that Jan. 6 rioters did not deserve to be indicted like former FBI Director James Comey.
"We have to ensure that the rule of law applies to everyone, and that's exactly what's happening here," Johnson told Tapper during a Sunday morning interview regarding the Comey indictment.
"Does the rule of law have to apply to people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th?" Tapper asked.
"Well, I'm glad you brought that up," Johnson replied. "There's new information over the last couple of days about that as well. Apparently, there were 274 FBI agents in the crowd on January 6th."
"No, no, no," Tapper interrupted. "[FBI Director] Kash Patel just brought enhanced understanding to that. They were sent there to do crowd control because of everything that was going on. It wasn't a false flag operation, as President Trump suggested."
"Well, Jake, wait a minute," Johnson remarked. "Hold on, Jake. How do you know that? Right? There's a lot of questions."
"Kash Patel said that," Tapper noted.
"I'm telling you that there's videos and it's always been disputed," Johnson deflected. "What involvement some of those persons engaged in? What involvement they had? Did they spur on the crowd? Did they open the gates to allow them in? I don't know. These are questions."
"The American people deserve full transparency," he added.
"I'm always in favor of full transparency, including for the Epstein files," Tapper responded.
It's unclear what made the officer chase the Canadian tourist down "at a high rate of speed," as they were several miles from a border crossing when the incident occurred. What is clear, though, is that it's yet another black eye for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where such incidents of harassment have become common in recent months.
Source: Toronto Star
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency says it is conducting a “managerial review” after a video posted on Reddit Thursday shows what appears to be a CBP agent in a pickup truck speeding toward and yelling at an Ontario driver in New York state, about three kilometres from the Canadian border.
The video showed a man wearing a CBP Field Operations patch drive close behind the filming driver, before pulling up alongside them: “Never come to the U.S. again,” they could be heard saying.
After noticing the driver was filming, the supposed CBP officer slowed down, before speeding up and overtaking the driver without using a turn signal.
The incident happened just before 8 a.m. Monday on exit 24 of Interstate 190, near Niagara, N.Y., according to the video. The poster said the purported CBP officer honked after noticing their Ontario plate.
NOTUS did a deep dive into the Trump administration’s likely illegal grab of funds allocated by Congress.
Across federal agencies, the Trump administration’s aggressive slash-and-burn approach to federal programs, grants and contracts has repeatedly challenged Congress’ power of the purse. The administration has claimed it has the discretion to redirect funds to programs aligned with Trump’s agenda — and Republican congressional leaders have largely let them do it.
The outcome: Billions in taxpayer dollars have become virtually untraceable — a level of opaqueness in government funds that’s raising questions around the legality of the administration’s actions. Some of these taxpayer funds expire on Sept. 30. If they’re not spent by then, like all funds Congress appropriated specifically for 2025, they disappear.
NOTUS attempted to trace the money appropriated for more than 100 government programs to understand where taxpayer dollars are going, only to hit dead ends repeatedly. Data is outdated or conflicting, agencies have been vague in their explanations, and in many cases, there’s no publicly available evidence that appropriated money is being spent at all.
Welcome to (Northern Hemisphere) Autumn. This last week appears to have gone quickly and left very little in the way of a lasting impression. Perhaps that's for the best. (Hopefully guitar practice, at least, will stick around, and the bits of paperwork will have wound up where they're supposed to go.)
N and I have now been beshotted. Pfizer. Flu and pneumonia are week after next. Hopefully the effects of those will stick around as well. We've also scheduled studio time over the next couple of weeks. (He says after suddenly remembering to make sure we didn't get double-booked. Apparently not. Whew!)
I have not been logging my thrice-daily servings of what Colleen used to call "pill salad" as carefully as I ought to. But there's nothing still in my pill sorters today, so apparently I've been taking them. This week, anyway -- I remember there have been a couple of weeks when I missed one. I also haven't been very careful with logging my sleep. Not really all that surprising; I tend to walk over to my computer and promptly fall down a rabbit hole rather than making whatever log entry I intended to make.
Hopefully you won't need to know How to Set Up and Use a Burner Phone, but these are perilous times.
I was never a full Qanonologist and I never heard about medbeds before, but apparently they're the secret technology that is going to be installed in hospitals everywhere and we will all be cured of everything for free. Good news for my plantar fasciitis!
Anyhoo...
A fun challenge for reporters, at least! "Some experts say medbed technology is unlikely to be ready any time soon" might be a line in a Peter Baker article soon.alicublog: Roy Edroso breaks it down.
Rewire: Trump's second term hits differently now that I'm out of the closet.
TomDispatch: The death of civil rights in the age of Trump.
Letters from an American: The Wounded Knee Massacre.
Jen Sorensen: Rage at the ragged.
This installment by Batocchio. E-mail tips to mbru AT crooksandliars DOT com.
Theo is growing rapidly. He'll be one year old by the end of October, and it hardly seems possible.
He's a cheeky little monkey, outgoing and very confident.
He's totally adorable when he sees me. Gives a big smile and crawls, very fast, over to see me. Grabs hold of my legs, pulls himself to standing, and asks to be picked up. (Not verbally, but it's a very expectant face)
Which I love doing - he's very cuddly.
But, he's also getting heavy. Very heavy...
And my back is suffering.
I've got to learn to resist that happy face, and play with him on the floor. And read books to him on the floor as well. I think that lifting him onto my knee when I'm reading to him is actually the biggest source of the back pain, as I have to lean forward to do it.
Writer: Jerry Ordway
Pencils: Peter Krause
Inks: Mike Manley
Could Mary Bromfield be Billy’s long-lost sister? (Spoilers in the tags.)
( Read more... )
The state of the economy and who is to blame wasn't the only thing VP JD Vance blatantly lied about during his interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox on Friday night.
Vance was also asked about the looming government shutdown, and pushed the same bullshit we heard from Speaker Mike Johnson, who, as Politico reported, wrote this on the evil bird site:
“Democrats are holding the AMERICAN government HOSTAGE — in an attempt to give FREE health care to NONCITIZENS, which was just outlawed by Congress,” House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in an X post today.
Johnson is referring to a portion of Republicans’ domestic spending megabill that penalizes California and other states for using state tax revenue to cover undocumented residents by expanding their versions of the federal Medicaid program.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pushed back on this narrative during a news conference today.
Donald J. Trump announced on Truth Social Saturday that he plans to send troops to "war-ravaged Portland," Oregon, to protect ICE facilities, claiming the city is "under siege" by Antifa.
"At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists," Trump wrote. "I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"
Jinkies, I wonder if this is why:
Portland authorities are in a standoff with the Trump administration over an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in the Oregon city, after an investigation found the administration is using the facility for overnight detentions, in violation of its city-issued permits.
Portland is part of the United States, and Trump is launching a war within the US against the US. The news isn't going down well.
Rep Drunken Van Orden has tweeted more than 1,000 times since Charlie Kirk's death. By far, the majority of his tweets involve doxxing and threatening American citizens who don't like Charlie Kirk and didn't praise him after he died. DVO has gone as far as blaming reporters and threatening funding to an entire city if two council members don't resign.
And now he is threatening federal funding for the Mayo Clinic because of the posts from one person:
Heartland Signal reports that when one of DVO's constituents called into a show where DVO was a guest, DVO got belligerent and insulting to the caller:
When asked if this funding should be removed because somebody at Mayo Clinic said something that he didn’t agree with, Van Orden got defensive and doubled down on his pledge to remove all federal funding from the Mayo Clinic and falsely claimed that the organization is “inciting violence.”