Saturday Report 11/29/25 — Is a cornered party as dangerous as a cornered rat?

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion

Image by Robert Owen-Wahl from Pixabay

— Is Trump in mental decline or has he always behaved like an ass? For Thanksgiving, Mango Mussolini tweeted out a series of vicious attacks, calling Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded,” repeating the disgusting, well-debunked rightwing lie that Black Somali-immigrant Congresswoman Ilhan Omar had married her brother, and lied about immigrants getting federal benefits.
This followed his snapping, “Quiet, Piggy!” to a female reporter last week, calling another female reporter “stupid” yesterday for pointing out that he’d lied about the vetting of the Afghan CIA employee who Trump had approved to live in the US. Earlier in the week, he’d called for the death of six members of Congress, and — when asked if he’d go to the funeral of the National Guard soldier who’d died in the DC shooting — instead went off on a rant about his election victory margin in her home state of West Virginia.
Trump recently underwent an MRI at Bethesda — a procedure that can be used to diagnose dementia and Alzheimer’s — and the White House is now refusing to release any of the records associated with it. Governor Walz has called for the MRI results to be released, apparently provoking Trump’s Thanksgiving-night tirade, but Americans deserve to know if their president is sliding into dementia or worse (his father died of Alzheimer’s). Release the MRI results!

— Big Brother tries to get bigger. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Donald Trump are pushing us another dangerous inch closer toward an all-seeing police state. According to a recent exposé, DHS wants blanket access to state driver’s-license databases — via the shadowy network Nlets — so it can bulk-feed personal data on millions of Americans into Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), the program now being re-cast as a sweeping “citizenship verification” and voter-roll policing system.
This is not just “checking for noncitizens.” This is a blueprint for dossiers — full dossiers — on every person with a license: name, address, birthdate, Social Security number, even photos, all searchable across federal agencies.
Once this data trove exists, watch what happens next: arbitrary surveillance, targeting of political enemies, innocent people flagged as “non-citizens,” voter roll purges, and a chilling permanent presence of federal authority peering into every aspect of daily life.
If we don’t stop this monstrous expansion of power now — if we allow centralized data-hoarding under the guise of “election integrity” — we hand over our privacy, our democracy and, ultimately, our freedoms.

— Judges are getting seriously pissed at Trump’s illegal orders flooding their courts.We’re watching a cruel, retrograde crackdown masquerading as law enforcement. According to recent reporting, immigrant detention operations in 2025 have exploded under the boot-heel of government agencies, with whole communities live in fear of sweeps, arrests, and indefinite detention.
Families ripped apart. People locked behind bars, often without trial, sometimes subject to solitary conditions condemned by human-rights experts as torture.
This isn’t “border control.” This is state-sanctioned terror. A machinery of deportation targeting the most vulnerable, built on cruelty and indifference.
We must resist. We must demand accountability. We must ensure America does not become the nation that detains children in cages, silences the powerless, and forfeits its own soul.

— Trump is now literally hiding the economic scoreboard because the numbers are a disaster. Key federal reports on jobs, GDP, wages, and inflation are being delayed or blocked altogether, right as Americans are getting hammered by soaring prices and shrinking purchasing power. Families heading into the holidays are finding that groceries, gifts, and basic necessities cost far more than they did even a year ago, while wages barely budge. Tariffs are jacking up prices across entire sectors, consumer spending is weakening, and small businesses are feeling the squeeze. When a president buries the data, it’s predictably because the truth is worse than the spin. This has to end.

— Is a cornered party as dangerous as a cornered rat? We should be sober: the political winds are blowing hard against the ruling party. Republicans are staring at a meltdown. Their razor-thin congressional majority is threatened, as resignations and defections mount and internal chaos spreads throughout leadership. With public confidence falling and little else but chaos to run on, the GOP risks losing not just seats but the loyalty of voters.
This isn’t just a strategic stumble. It’s the collapse of a governing coalition built on shaky foundations, reckless mismanagement, and a refusal — or inability — to deliver real solutions. The “base” may still howl, but increasingly even hard-right insiders are muttering that their party is in deep trouble. Their margin in the House is perilously narrow: just 219 seats — barely over the 218 needed for a majority.
Now Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced she’ll resign in January 2026, and she’s not alone. Up to 41 other Republicans have signaled they won’t run for reelection, or may even quit mid-term.
That means even a single special election or quiet “retirement wave” could flip control of the House. Inside the GOP, insiders are warning: the rank-and-file are burning out, tension with leadership is rising, and confidence among voters is slipping. Will the Party support something wild or dangerous — like a war with Venezuela or invoking the Insurrection Act — or engage in massive voter purges and election fraud next November? We all need to stay alert!

— What’s happening in Tennessee — the state that brought us the Scopes Monkey Trial — is not careful “parental oversight,” it’s raw censorship. Over a thousand titles have been swept off public-school library shelves across the state. Rutherford County’s Board of Education alone stripped more than 145 books — including classics like Beloved and Catch-22 — labeling them unfit because they contain “sexual conduct, excess violence, nudity or sadomasochistic abuse.”
Districts from Monroe to Knox to Wilson are purging hundreds of others, from beloved children’s series to essential works about race, identity, violence, and history — erasing stories that young readers need to see.
This isn’t protecting kids. It’s smothering minds. It’s stifling empathy, erasing cultural memory, and denying students — especially those from marginalized backgrounds — the chance to see themselves reflected in literature.

— Two new developments expose a country sliding into fear-driven reaction and abrupt scapegoating. First comes Donald Trump — reacting to the DC shooting — declaring a “permanent pause” on migration from all “Third World Countries,” a sweeping ban threatening millions of immigrants and asylum seekers as if collective punishment were a viable policy.
Then we learn that the man accused in the D.C. shooting — Rahmanullah Lakanwal — served in an elite Afghan unit allied with the U.S., yet reportedly suffered severe mental-health trauma after years of combat.
The big lesson we should have learned from Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan is that the war always comes home. But instead of treating trauma, asylum, and immigration as human-rights challenges, the Trump regime’s instant reaction is to ban-hammer with a cruel, collective lash-out that punishes entire populations. That’s not security. That’s hysteria and political posturing masquerading as policy.

— The Republican war on education, culture, and the American Way. A Michigan professor was fired this month for assigning a peer-reviewed article on structural racism; it was a small story in the news, but should be a flashing red warning light for the rest of us. These attacks on academic freedom aren’t isolated incidents or culture-war skirmishes: they’re deliberate assaults on our ability to learn, question, and understand the forces shaping our lives. When politicians muzzle faculty or ban courses on race, gender, labor, or inequality, they’re not “protecting students.” They’re dismantling the very tools citizens need to challenge injustice. If we let this intellectual crackdown and Trump’s destruction of the Department of Education stand, we forfeit both education and democracy.