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— Vladimir Putin has spent the past year turning “plausible deniability” into a full-time European hobby, and this week Germany finally pushed back sorta, kinda, maybe hard. It took an explosive-laden drone found near an Ukraine-bound cargo plane at Germany’s Leipzig airport to provoke Berlin to formally accuse Moscow of running “a well-established pattern” of hybrid warfare. They expelled the Russian ambassador, shut down the Russian consulate in the capital city of Bonn, and put in place new visa restrictions on Russian visitors. After CIA Director and Trump lickspittle John Ratcliff made a sorta-secret visit to Russia, Trump tried to reassure the world, saying that his master Putin “is not going to be attacking a NATO territory.” Except that they already have, repeatedly, and are continuing to. The New York Times worried out loud this week about “a fight that spirals out of control.” Trump consistently kisses Putin’s ass while JD Vance recently said one of the “proudest” moments of his time in office was cutting off defensive weapons to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia keeps probing the defenses of European countries with drones and missiles, particularly the Baltic states. This administration’s cowardice and craven whimpering in the face of Putin’s aggression, and the complicity of Republicans in Congress, could easily lead us to a larger war in Europe that, in turn, could trigger World War III. And if Trump refuses to go along with Article 5 of the NATO treaty, as he has suggested may happen, this could be exactly what Putin and Xi are aiming for.
— Javier Milei has apparently decided that if you can’t win an economy, you can always win back a windswept archipelago full of penguins with 3,000 sheep-farmers. Great Britain has claimed and run the Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina, since 1833. But Milei is in big political trouble as his neoliberal reforms have gutted that nation’s middle class (just like neoliberal Reaganomics did to America’s) so — like Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, Bush Sr.’s invasion of Iraq, Bush Jr.’s invasion of Afghanistan, and now Trump’s attack on Iran — the Argentinian wannabe strongman has decided to whip up nationalist fervor over the islands to get voters’ minds off the economy. He’s apparently coordinating this with his “good friend” Trump, as our president recently said he’s “thinking of reviewing” America’s 70-year neutrality stance on the issue of the islands. When the actual Falklanders themselves held a referendum on which country should control them back in 2013, fully 99.8 percent of the voters wanted to stay with Britain. Downing Street, for its part, reaffirmed an “unshakeable“ commitment to the islands. Somewhere, Winston Churchill’s ghost is checking the tide tables while Abraham Lincoln’s is looking at the wreckage of the party he brought to power and sobbing…
— ICE has found a new frontier for cruelty at California’s largest immigration lockup: outlawing the hug. The California City Detention Facility is a former prison in the Mojave Desert that CoreCivic has converted into a concentration camp for brown-skinned people. It was reportedly opened without the proper permits and has since been running as a black box free of federal inspections. And now they’re forbidding “inmates” — the vast majority of whom have not committed any crime whatsoever (being in the country without authorization is a civil, not criminal, offense) — from touching their own families. Instead of the meeting rooms common in prisons (there’s one in this facility, too, although it’s unused), the company is apparently going along with the Trump policy of maximum cruelty by keeping people behind thick glass walls so they can only communicate with family members, children, newborns, and loved ones via a phone that goes through the glass. In response, a grassroots campaign called Hugs Beyond Bars has spent months trying to shame ICE and CoreCivic into allowing contact visits, delivering a 1,100-signature petition to Senator Alex Padilla’s office after a San Francisco vigil for the (at least) 24 people who’ve died in ICE custody so far this year. This is the same facility where a federal judge had to issue a preliminary injunction to force ICE to provide blankets and medical care to the roughly 1,000 people caged there in the near-freezing desert nights. Nothing radicalizes people quite like watching your own government decide affection is a security risk…
— Missouri’s Supreme Court just handed Trump’s national gerrymandering crusade its first real faceplant. That state’s highest court, in an unanimous ruling, blocked a Republican-drawn congressional map pushed through last September at Trump’s urging. It was specifically designed to dismantle Kansas City Democrat Emanuel Cleaver’s district, giving the GOP a seventh out of eight House seats from a state that’s only 49% registered Republicans. Rightwingers are freaking out: Attorney General Catherine Hanaway declared the ruling has thrust the state into a “constitutional crisis” and vowed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, while Trump himself took to his Nazi-infested social media site to call it a “Dark Day for ‘Justice.’” Democracy, deployed correctly, can still occasionally out-muscle a gerrymander, assuming the five black-robed on-the-take rightwingers in DC don’t decide otherwise in the next two months.
— Speaking of senators who’ve forgotten what their job is, John Fetterman’s transformation from Bernie-backing mayor of Braddock to Fox News’ favorite Democrat cleared its final decency checkpoint this week. The Wall Street Journal broke a bombshell investigation yesterday, finding that Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman is behaving more like a Republican than a Democrat. He claimed his stomach was upset so he couldn’t meet with three paralyzed veterans who’d traveled from rural Pennsylvania, but then an hour later strolled into his office and did an upbeat hit with Fox “News” to support Netanyahu’s genocidal policies. When Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said they were eager to talk to him about Medicaid cuts, he reportedly texted back, “Well I’m not,” claiming the hospital just wanted “free trips to DC.” He blew off a busload of flood-zone constituents who spotted him in the hallway — he refused to even acknowledge them — while finding time that same week for a meeting with a pro-Netanyahu college basketball coach. When he was told that a police funeral for three slain officers could run three hours, he texted, “This may be a nonstarter.” He’s popped into 26 hearings just long enough to get marked “present” but didn’t speak a single word in 20 of them. And now conservative donor cash is rolling into his campaign coffers and he polls better with Pennsylvania Republicans than their actual Republican senator does. Pennsylvania Democrats are genuinely horrified but they — and the rest of us — are stuck with this badly damaged and sadly deranged man for at least another two years.
— Trump has apparently spent so much time threatening to weaponize the Federal Reserve, sanction foreign assets, and personally inspect Fort Knox that America’s oldest allies have started quietly walking their gold out the door. As Hitler was moving across Europe, country after country shipped their gold reserves to the United States for safe-keeping. Now, they’ve concluded that Trump’s so deeply embedded up Putin’s backside and so irrational that they can’t trust us any longer, so they’re shipping it all back home. The Netherlands announced this week it’s moved roughly $12 billion in bullion — most of it previously parked in New York — over to London, while France already sold off $15 billion held in New York and replaced it with bars kept safely in Paris. Germany and Italy, the world’s second- and third-largest gold hoarders, are reportedly weighing whether to bring theirs home too. When the people who fled their assets out of Europe because they were worried about Hitler begin to do the same because of Trump, Americans should take serious note of what a dangerous sign of the times this is.
— Elon Musk, a man who spent a quarter-billion dollars to buy the last election for Trump and got access to Americans’ private data with it (along with stopping dozens of investigations into him and his companies), is reportedly in a full panic over a documentary he can’t buy his way out of. Ashley St. Clair, one of the mothers of Musk’s 14 known children, says that Musk told her how the 2024 elections results would come out, but did so “hours” before the public knew thanks, he said, to a secretive satellite data program. Now, Musk is freaking out because director Alex Gibney’s film “Musk,” due out October 16, is said to expose the billionaire as among the most dangerous men on Earth, and reportedly digs into St. Clair’s claim. My old friend and colleague David Sirota summed up Musk’s meltdown succinctly: “The bully is mad.” Musk has already called the film a “hit piece” and Gibney a “douche,” which, from the man who bought a social media platform specifically so he could promote white supremacy and control his own narrative, tracks. Turns out there’s one thing money still can’t buy: an accountability journalist and documentary-maker who isn’t afraid of you.
