Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dropped the fog-of-war excuse when talking about a deadly Caribbean boat strike that killed 11 people back in September, claiming he bailed from the control room after the first hit and missed seeing survivors before a second strike took them out. The whole thing has lawmakers asking if American military brass committed war crimes by ordering that follow-up attack on people clinging to wreckage.
Military experts are basically calling BS on using fog-of-war as cover since the phrase describes imperfect battlefield info from a Prussian general's old writings about Napoleon-era combat. They point out that professional militaries have ways to cut through uncertainty, and citing foggy conditions raises bigger...
Demand Justice dropped a million bucks on TV spots going after John Fetterman, Maggie Hassan, and Angus King for backing Trump's judicial picks who refuse to say Trump lost in 2020 or call January 6 an insurrection. The liberal group argues these lifetime appointees dodge straightforward questions by only saying Biden got certified as the 46th president, and one nominee even called January 6 a subject of ongoing political debate when asked to denounce it.
The campaign targets moderate Democratic-aligned senators who are not up for reelection, and Demand Justice says they will pull the ads if Democrats stop confirming nominees who push Trump's election lies. If more judges get confirmed with Democratic votes, the group plans to escalate...
Trump blasted his old Treasury guy, Steven Mnuchin, for recommending Jerome Powell to run the Federal Reserve, and the president basically threatened to fire his current Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, if he cannot get the Fed to slash interest rates faster. Kevin Hassett from the National Economic Council seems like the frontrunner to replace Powell when his term ends, but Trump keeps flip-flopping on the announcement while complaining that borrowing costs are not dropping fast enough despite inflation ticking back up from tariffs.
Bessent is stuck trying to find someone who will be the rate-cutting dove Trump wants, and the whole search has turned into a loyalty test where candidates have to publicly audition by promising cheaper...
Trump keeps saying he's about to lock down a deal with Harvard after months of pressuring them, but the whole thing keeps stalling over where the cash actually goes. The school was ready to drop 500 million on workforce training programs, but then Trump administration hardliners started demanding some of that money get paid straight to the federal government as a fine, and Harvard officials basically said hell no to what they see as either a bribe or an admission of guilt.
The university already won a court case that forced the feds to restore billions in research funding, but school leadership still thinks they need to negotiate because they're worried about getting blacklisted from future federal contracts. Campus people are furious...
Kenner, Louisiana, turned into a ghost town after federal agents rolled through this week for immigration raids, and the Latino community that helped rebuild post-Katrina is basically hiding indoors. The local police chief signed up with Homeland Security back in March to let his officers flag undocumented people during traffic stops, and a family running a Mexican restaurant started sleeping on mattresses inside their business because they're terrified of getting pulled over on the drive home.
The suburb west of New Orleans went from a 30 percent Hispanic population to complete paranoia mode, with money transfer spots empty and a nine-year-old kid who can't play soccer in his backyard anymore after a neighbor threatened to call...
A street preacher from Mississippi named Gabriel Olivier got busted for yelling at concertgoers outside an amphitheater after Brandon city officials pushed protesters way back from the venue, and the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether he can sue over the ordinance even though he had already got convicted and paid his fine. Olivier and his church crew would post up with bullhorns and graphic banners calling people whores and sissies at shows, which made the city create a protest zone 265 feet away from where crowds actually walked through.
The justices seemed willing to let him file a civil lawsuit to block future enforcement without overturning his criminal case, with both Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson suggesting...
Back when the Kansas GOP was melting down over stripping minority groups from their executive committee, two Young Republicans named William Hendrix and Alex Dwyer got roasted for backing the chair's plan and decided to take over the state's Young Republican branch. Fast forward to October, when their group chat with 10 other Young Republican leaders got leaked, and it was packed with Hitler praise plus racist and antisemitic garbage that got seven people canned from their jobs.
Hendrix claims it was all edgy jokes between friends doing online-style banter, and JD Vance even jumped in to defend them as kids making offensive humor. But the chat had legit neo-Nazi code drops like 1488, and Dwyer had already been pushed out of a local...
A DC federal judge dropped an order blocking immigration agents from nabbing people without warrants unless they can prove the person might bounce before getting proper paperwork, and Judge Beryl Howell called out officers for potentially breaking federal law with their arrest methods. The ruling happened after immigration groups documented over two dozen cases where plainclothes agents in unmarked cars would swoop in on people, and one guy from El Salvador even got grabbed by mistake before being cut loose.
The decision mirrors what went down in Denver recently, where another judge said agents were holding immigrants for up to 100 days without showing they were flight risks. Howell got pretty spicy about officials like Stephen Miller...
The Trump administration hit pause on immigration paperwork for people from 19 nations that got slapped with travel restrictions back in June, and this freeze covers green card requests plus citizenship applications from places like Iran, Sudan, Eritrea, Haiti, and Somalia. Matthew Tragesser from US Citizenship and Immigration Services confirmed the move after a shooting incident involving an Afghan asylum recipient spooked officials into tightening things up even more. Immigration attorneys started seeing naturalization ceremonies get scrapped with zero warning, and their clients were showing up to scheduled interviews only to find out everything had been canceled.
The new policy basically throws another wrench into an already...
