Nathalia Filgueiras

I am absolutely sickened by the horrendous comments directed at this heroic young woman who did her duty to the very end. She wasn’t even the Pilot in Command (PIC). Her job at that time was handling all the comms. The male pilot at the controls had already realized the graveness of the situation and had started praying as there was nothing either of them could do to save the aircraft. Do not listen to the cockpit audio of her last minutes, please. It should not even have been made public. Nathalia Filgueiras did her duty under the absolute worst of circumstances. She relayed factual information right up until impact while shoulder-rolling at 60° bank at 600 MPH. The information will be invaluable in the investigation. Even as she knew her short but amazing 20 years of life were about to end, she devoted those last seconds to saving future lives by providing critical information to ground control that will inevitably save lives in the future by preventing these types of crashes. The very definition of Heroism. At only 20 years old. 😭💔🕯️ Please keep her, her family and the other crash victims in your prayers. 💔😭😢🙏

— Lilith✡️🌈🖤🏳️‍🌈🪷💜 (@Lilith_Curses) November 2, 2026

The electoral pendulum is swinging

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack diary entry for November 2.

It summarizes Trump's ridiculous "closing argument for the midterm elections," his speech at the Reflecting Pool, where he rambled on about the pool for 16 minutes, then turning to the usual lies and wild exaggerations he's been spouting at every one of his rallies lately.

 Being a historian, she compares today's situation -- where "a small group of men has rigged the system to funnel the wealth produced by ordinary people into their own pockets. With that wealth, they have bought power and undermined democracy in favor of themselves" -- with similar situations the country has been in since its founding.

She starts with the push of settlers across the Appalachian Mountains into "the miraculously rich resources of the land to the west" discovered by Daniel Boone. She says the settlers "quickly discovered that equality was not the inevitable result of economic freedom. Some men settled on better land than others, some had family money, some were just lucky, and quickly, those men accumulated more than others."

Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, "which was designed to prevent wealthy men from dominating the new western lands. However, "over the next fifty years, a handful of wealthy enslavers tightened a stranglehold on the South. After 1854, when their intention to control the whole nation became obvious, Americans from a range of political parties came together to oust them from power. They created a government that worked to develop the economy from the bottom, educating young men and giving them land to farm. They tried to make America into a land where every man, regardless of race or background, could rise through hard work. They abolished human enslavement except as punishment for crime, then gave freedmen the vote to enable them to protect their own economic interests."

After the Civil War, "Money and power again began to concentrate at the top of society, among those who became known as “robber barons.” When their control of the government helped to crash the economy in 1893, the American people once again came together to oust them from power, and the Progressive Era recreated a government intended to work for everyone."

But then "The same old pattern of demonizing Black Americans and immigrants for supposedly stealing tax dollars repeated. Men determined to control the country insisted that government regulations and taxes took away a man’s liberty to run his business as he saw fit and undermined the individualism that made America great. In the 1920s, they convinced American voters to turn the government over to businessmen, whose policies, once again, concentrated wealth. When the bottom fell out of that system in 1929 with the Great Crash, Americans came together to demand government work for all Americans, rather than a privileged few."

The result was FDR's "New Deal," and "and most Americans thought the system that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights was so popular it would last forever."

But starting in 1980, Reagan began to undermine that system. Blaming "socialism," the Republicans cut regulations and taxes, helping money—"more than $50 trillion—move upward to the richest 1% of Americans. With it moved political power"

And so the U.S. finds itself in a situation today where voting is suppressed while billionaires pump money into the electoral system -- Elon Musk has spent at least $446 million, an astounding sum for a midterm election -- to buy Republican control of Congress. 

However, it seems the pendulum is swinging again: "the open looting of the government in Trump’s second term appears to have revealed to a majority of the American people that the policies the Republican Party has enacted since 1981 benefit only a few. Once again, it seems, Americans are coming together, ready to follow the pattern of the past and rebuild a government that works not just for the wealthy, but for everyone." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://x.com/pitlessball/status/2107939018721706395/video/1

Caitlin surrounded!

The single best play of the season https://t.co/veOHh8fjkK

— The WNBA is Openly Corrupt (@power_ties) October 24, 2026

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American, her Substack diary, for October 4, 2026.

It's a short discussion of the Roaring '20s, the stock market crash (October 24, 1929, was the beginning; the market teetered on the edge until the bottom fell out on October 29, Black Tuesday), the Great Depression, and economic recovery and the New Deal under FDR. 

Witkoff backlash - Putin a humanitarian?

Steve Witkoff -- not a diplomat, but Trump's NYC real estate buddy acting as "special envoy for peace missions" --  is facing backlash after calling Vladimir Putin a “humanitarian” during talks in St. Petersburg, after Russia released American Stephen Hubbard from four years of detention. I've copy-and-pasted the following response from one of my favorites, Caring Guy, on Twitter. It's in the form of a reply to Witkoff:

WTAF is wrong with you? Stop emarrasing the US. 

You actually stood in front of Vladimir Putin today and called him a humanitarian. You thanked him for releasing a 74-year-old American whom his government had wrongfully imprisoned for more than four years. I’m glad Stephen Hubbard is free, but apparently you need a history lesson about the man you’re praising. 

Let’s start with Ukraine. Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country in February 2022, launching a war that has killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of people. Russian forces have bombed residential neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and critical civilian infrastructure. They’ve destroyed entire communities, attacked power grids, and left families without electricity and heat during freezing winters. According to the United Nations, at least 2,570 civilians were killed and another 15,211 injured in Ukraine during just the first nine months of 2026. Those are verified casualties, not the total human cost of this war. 

Let’s talk about the Ukrainian children forcibly deported or transferred by Russian authorities. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in March 2023 over alleged war crimes involving the unlawful deportation and transfer of children. A United Nations investigation subsequently concluded that Russian authorities committed crimes against humanity through these deportations and enforced disappearances. The investigators documented more than 1,200 affected children, most of whom had not been returned to their families. 

Then there’s Bucha, where Russian troops summarily executed civilians during their occupation. There’s the systematic torture of Ukrainian prisoners, sexual violence, enforced disappearances, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. United Nations investigators have documented these atrocities and concluded that Russian authorities committed multiple crimes against humanity. These aren’t accusations invented by Putin’s political opponents. They’re the findings of international investigations. 

And Putin’s record didn’t begin with Ukraine. Under his leadership, Russian forces devastated Chechnya, where human rights investigators documented disappearances, torture, and summary executions. In Syria, Russian forces helped Bashar al-Assad wage devastating military campaigns that struck hospitals, schools, markets, and residential neighborhoods. Human Rights Watch documented war crimes committed during those operations. 

Now let’s look inside Russia. Putin’s government has systematically suppressed political opposition, imprisoned critics, censored journalists, and criminalized antiwar dissent. Alexei Navalny, one of Putin’s most prominent political opponents, survived poisoning, was imprisoned, and died in Russian custody in February 2024. Russian authorities have continued persecuting his supporters and lawyers. 

And let’s not forget Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. All 298 people aboard that civilian aircraft died when a Russian Buk missile brought it down over eastern Ukraine in 2014. International investigators subsequently identified strong indications that Putin authorized the supply of the missile system to Russian-backed separatists. 

Steve, diplomacy sometimes requires dealing with people responsible for terrible things. I understand that. But negotiating with Putin doesn’t require flattering him, ignoring his record, or pretending that releasing one wrongfully detained American somehow makes up for the suffering inflicted on millions of innocent people. 

You can thank Putin for releasing Stephen Hubbard without rewriting history. You can negotiate peace without abandoning the truth. And you can represent the United States without standing in front of a man wanted by the International Criminal Court and praising his humanitarian credentials. 

The people buried beneath the rubble of Ukrainian cities, the families searching for their missing children, the prisoners who have endured torture, and the millions driven from their homes deserve more than an American diplomat publicly praising the man whose government inflicted so much of that suffering. 

Do you even know what "humanitarian" means? 

Clinton-Trump debate, continued

An excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson's Substack entry for October 19, 2026:

It was exactly ten years ago tonight that then–Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the American people that Russian president Vladimir Putin hoped to have a “puppet” in the White House, and that Donald Trump was that puppet.

A scowling Trump responded: “No puppet. No puppet.”

Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear.

Trump interjected: “You’re the puppet.”

Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear you won’t admit…”

Trump interjected: “No, you’re the puppet.”

Clinton: “...that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race.”

Trump shook his head disparagingly.

Ten years later, Trump is openly embracing Putin and is working to destroy the strongest and most successful alliance in human history to cement that partnership, apparently with an eye to enriching himself.

Ukraine Betrayed

This is copy-and-pasted, an article by Anthony Scaramucci entitled "The Promise We Made in Budapest."

In December 1994, the United States made a promise. Ukraine had inherited the third-largest nuclear arsenal on earth when the Soviet Union collapsed, and it agreed to give every warhead away. In exchange, the Budapest Memorandum committed the United States, Russia, and Britain to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and existing borders, and to refrain from threatening or using force against it. Ukraine kept its end of the bargain. Russia shredded its end in 2014 and again in 2022. And now an American president treats our end as if it never existed.

 

Look at what happened just this month. In Miami, American envoys floated expanded security guarantees that Ukraine’s team welcomed, and then the talks collapsed after President Trump agreed to ease sanctions so Russia could import hundreds of thousands of barrels of diesel, as part of a side deal with Vladimir Putin. Even a senior EU official in the room said the move caught negotiators by surprise. Now reports say he may cut off intelligence sharing with Kyiv.

 

Budapest was the bedrock of a bargain America has sold the world for thirty years: give up the bomb, and the great powers will respect your sovereignty. When the president walks away from that bargain to do Putin a favor, he is telling us whose side he instinctively takes when a dictator and a democracy collide.

 

Ask why. Vladimir Putin is the world’s leading practitioner of slowly dismantling a free society. He jailed and poisoned his opponents, crushed the independent press, turned the courts into instruments of the Kremlin, and rewrote the constitution to rule indefinitely. This is the man Donald Trump called a “genius” on the eve of the full-scale invasion. Admiration is not yet policy. But it is a preview, and we no longer have to guess what the preview looks like.

 

The deeper tell is how he treats promises, and the record at home already shows that. In September 2025, he publicly demanded on Truth Social that his attorney general prosecute James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James. The career U.S. attorney who doubted the cases was pushed out and replaced by Trump’s former personal lawyer, a woman with no prosecutorial experience, who secured indictments of Comey and James within weeks. A federal judge threw both cases out because she had been unlawfully appointed. Days after his inauguration, he fired seventeen inspectors general, the independent watchdogs that root out fraud, by two-sentence email, and a federal judge later called it “obvious” that he broke the law. A man who treats the nation’s word abroad as disposable treats the rules that protect you at home the same way.

The pattern runs straight through the First Amendment and into our streets. His FCC chairman threatened broadcasters’ licenses over their coverage of the Iran war, and the president cheered him on. He federalized the National Guard and sent troops into Democratic-led cities against their governors' objections, until courts, including the Supreme Court in the Chicago case, stopped him; his response was that it was only a matter of time before he sent them back. I served in that White House for eleven days, as everyone loves to remind me, and I saw how quickly the line between the country's interests and one man's grievances disappears. Our institutions are not self-executing.

They hold only because people inside them refuse to bend.

In 1994, the United States told a young democracy that it would respect its freedom if it disarmed. If this president will walk away from that promise to please Vladimir Putin, ask yourself what he would walk away from to please himself. The Bill of Rights is a promise too — that the government will not silence your speech, prosecute you for opposing it, or send soldiers into your city because your governor is from the wrong party. Defending the word we gave Ukraine and defending the freedoms we promised ourselves are the same fight. Watch what he does for Putin, because it shows you what he would like to do with his power over you.

Trump-Putin alliance

Any time before 2015, when Trump descended his golden escalator, who could have foreseen such a development, with the U.S. president wholeheartedly allying himself and his nation with Russia?

Russia-Russia-Russia was no hoax.

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's October 18, 2026, diary entry on Substack.

She concludes her article:

But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator. 

Trump's Nerobefehl (Nero Decree)

Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack article on October 14 entitled "Nerobefehl Nation," subtitled "My fears for the next two years."

  

On March 19, 1945, with the war no longer in doubt -- Soviets within 50 miles of Berlin, the Allies closing in from the west -- Hitler ordered that German infrastructure -- including transportation systems, industrial facilities, utilities, and communications -- be destroyed rather than let it fall into Allied hands.  The stated aim was to prevent the advancing enemy from using these resources.

However, by this time Hitler believed not that he had failed, but that the German people had failed him. The obvious purpose of the Nerobefehl was to punish his own country. Albert Speer and others prevented the order from being carried out.

Will Trump declare a Nerobefehl if, as expected, he suffers a crushing defeat in November's election? He will certainly insist the election was rigged and try to overturn it. If he fails, what then? He will retain the capacity to inflict immense destruction on America and its allies.

Today Elon Musk has denied Ukraine access to Starlink facilities giving warning of impending Russian missile strikes. Trump, in brazen defiance of a court order, had hundreds of trees cut down at a D.C. public golf course Trump has wanted to remodel -- a deliberate act of vandalism.  The Kennedy Center is being destroyed because Trump has been unable to put his name on it.

With a supine Congress and the backing of Trump's cadre of oligarchs, it will be difficult to curb his excesses.  Krugman closes his article:

But one thing Democrats can do is make it clear that everyone who aids and abets Trump in his Neroism can and will be held accountable to the full extent of the law. At this point anyone who says something like “We should look forward, not back” is making it significantly less likely that we will have anything to look forward to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trump v. Ukraine

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry on Substack for October 10, 2026, detailing events in Ukraine since 1994, when Ukraine surrendered its stockpile of nuclear weapons (the third-largest in the world at the time). This was the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. The parties were the U.S., the U.K., and Russia. The terms of the memorandum guaranteed that military force or economic coercion would not be used against Ukraine. (Of course, we know by know what treaties are worth to Donald Trump.)

Richardson tells how Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian puppet, secured the assistance of political advisor Paul Manafort to remake his image and get him elected president of Ukraine, Yanukovych proceeded to align Ukraine with Russia and loot the country; he was ousted by a popular revolution (the Revolution of Dignity) and fled to Russia. Russia then invaded and annexed Ukraine's Crimea.

By then Roger Stone was advising Trump's 2016 campaign, and he invited his friend Paul Manafort to join, becoming campaign chairman. Manafort continued to conspire with Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik to work for Russian control of Ukraine, the "Mariupol Plan." Trump attempted to facilitate this plan and to smear Joe Biden, trying to strongarm Zelenslyy into declaring that Biden was under investigation for supposed financial chicanery involving Burisma Holdings, a company which had Hunter Biden as a director.

When Trump was in office for his second term, "he promptly tried to swing the U.S. behind Russia. His appointees insisted that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russia’s support for Trump, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Repeatedly, Trump has threatened Zelensky and tried to cajole him into surrendering the territory Russia wants." 

There's much more, bringing things up to date with Trump's recent deal with Putin to buy millions of tonnes of diesel fuel from Russia. Then there's the frivolous lawsuit Trump is bringing against Hillary Clinton and others:

Also yesterday, Trump asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on a lawsuit over the 2016 election that he brought in 2022 against Hillary Clinton and former members of the Department of Justice, including former director of the FBI James Comey, Clinton’s campaign chair, and a grab bag of others. Trump sued them for conspiring to tie him to Russia in order to undermine his campaign.

As John Fritze of CNN reported yesterday, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit as “frivolous” and ruled that Trump’s attorneys were liable for nearly $1 million in sanctions. The 11th U.S. Circuit of Appeals upheld most of that decision last year. “This case should never have been brought,” U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida wrote. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.” Now Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tech bros in the military?

The U.S. Army officially swore in four technology executives as lieutenant colonels on June 13, 2025. Their special unit is called Detachment 201: The Executive Innovation Corps. The four were:

1. Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir.

2. Andrew Bosworth - Chief Technology Officer of Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram.

3.Kevin Weil - then Chief Product Officer of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.

4. Bob McGrew - former Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, subsequently an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab.

These tech bros were joined in June 2026 by three more:

1. Dane Knecht -  Chief Technology Officer of Cloudflare , a company specializing in internet infrastructure and cybersecurity.

2. Sam Pullara - Managing director and Chief Technology Officer of Sutter Hill Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies.

3. Serkan Piantino -  Co-founder of Facebook AI Research and former vice-president of products at Reddit.

The seven are part-time military officers, recruited primarily to advise Army leaders on technology, cybersecurity and military modernization—not full-time serving soldiers. They signed eight-year Reserve contracts and must serve at least 112 hours annually

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The making of Donald Trump

This is a post on Twitter from "Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist":

Let’s say you wanted to construct the most dangerous possible man. How would you do it? 

You would start with someone naturally stupid, but not so stupid they can’t perform. 

You’d place them in a privileged family with sociopathic parents who provided no emotional attachment. 

You’d have them be the second son of a father who rejected his first-born as weak—to the point he committed suicide. 

You’d raise him to be cruel. You’d introduce him to sadists like Roy Cohn. You’d model belittling women, minorities, and anyone less privileged. You break him down until everyday sadism becomes his lifestyle. 

By adulthood, you’d have a fully formed malignant narcissist, a psychopath so consumed with his own superiority that he believes everyone is out to get what he has—a paranoid, Machiavellian sadist with no empathy and no morals. 

You’d give him access to criminals like Jeffrey Epstein who cultivated his sexual sadism and collected compromising information. 

You’d send him to Moscow to get brainwashed by Soviet intelligence. 

You continuously feed his narcissism by ensuring he’s rescued from every situation—as if by magic. 

You’d make him feel legally and financially invulnerable by letting him get away with crime after crime, fraud after fraud, and six bankruptcies. 

You’d rescue him from the sewer of his life by giving him a prime time TV show based on his narcissistic self-image—a show which celebrated his cruelty as business acumen. 

You’d let him get away with colluding with a foreign power to steal a presidential election. You’d let him get away with a violent insurrection to try to hold on to power when he lost. 

And you’d stand by for four years while he plotted to come back and take his revenge. 

However, you haven’t quite completed the path to the worst possible man, although you have achieved a rare feat. You have successfully created a messianic narcissist with the nuclear codes. Great start! 

But you must take things one step further: you must give him frontal lobe dementia and drain from his brain any remaining ability to reason, make judgements, or take advice. This will destroy his ability to understand the consequences of his actions. His salience network will be disintegrated, making it impossible to tell what matters—even to himself. 

You’d surround him with people incentivized to conceal his incapacity to function. You’d fill the federal government and the Pentagon with deviant psychopaths who are perfectly happy to exploit his disorders for profit, ideology, and enjoyment. 

And then you would create a global emergency of his own making. You’d have him repeatedly fail at everything he tries and have his popularity plummet to historic levels. You’d have him be mocked by the entire world. 

Finally, as a last straw, you threaten him with losing an election by a monstrous landslide. 

That’s how you get the most dangerous man in the world.

Televise the execution of Nidal Hasan?

This is a Twitter post by Robert W. Burns III, an army veteran and a retired trauma nurse, editor and publisher of The Space Coast Rocket:

WE COUNT THE ENEMIES WE KILL. WE RARELY COUNT THE ONES WE CREATE. 

Nidal Hasan was a patient on my floor in the surgical trauma ICU at Brooke Army Medical Center. 

I wasn't there when he arrived. I had just left for my deployment to Mosul, Iraq. But the nurses and doctors who cared for him were my peers and my friends, and I know exactly what that required of them, because every one of us had done some version of it before. Before anyone tells me what strength looks like, understand what that work demands. 

I have cared for a drunk driver who wiped out an entire family and landed in our ICU himself. I have cared for gang members who shot up a block while children were stepping off a school bus, then ended up on our unit with bullets of their own. I have kept alive people who murdered their own families and failed at taking their own lives. And in Iraq, I saved the lives of the very enemy fighters who had just tried to kill us and miraculously survived our response. 

Every one of those patients got our best. Not because we felt anything for them, but because of who we were. You set aside anger, grief, prejudice and every personal feeling you have, because a life in front of you is a life in front of you. That's the oath. That's the duty. 

So when Hasan came through those doors, my colleagues did what we had always done. They preserved the life of a man who murdered thirteen people and would have killed them too, given the chance. He killed those men and women in one of the very same buildings many Soldier's like myself have been in when I was stationed at Fort Hood. He is alive today because they did their jobs. That was not sentiment. It was a hard, tangible expression of the values this country claims to stand for. Our principles had to mean something even when the person benefiting from them had violated everything we believed in. 

Now the Pentagon plans to livestream his execution by firing squad on Dec. 3, and our leaders apparently believe turning his death into a public spectacle will demonstrate American strength. I think it demonstrates how little they understand the enemy they claim to be fighting. We kept Nidal Hasan alive, now our leaders want to make him a martyr. 

Hasan walked into Fort Hood expecting to die. He believed his death would be rewarded. At his trial, he called no witnesses and offered no defense, and his own court-appointed lawyers worried he was seeking execution. He failed at martyrdom once. Now we're about to hand it to him, in high definition, for every extremist with an internet connection to replay, manipulate and celebrate. 

We supply the footage. They supply the meaning. 

Long after the politicians finish congratulating themselves, that video will still exist. Their moment of bravado becomes somebody else's recruiting material for decades. And this failure to think past the immediate display of power reaches far beyond one execution. We count the enemies we kill. We rarely count the enemies we create. 

Look at the school in Minab, Iran, where multiple investigations attributed the strike that killed more than 100 children and their teachers to us. You cannot bury people's children beneath the rubble of their classrooms and expect a speech about American intentions to decide how they remember you. No denial brings those children home. No claim of good intentions makes their parents forget whose weapons killed them. 

If those were our children, we would remember for the rest of our lives. We would demand accountability. Many of us would want vengeance. We would tell their stories to the next generation. We know this because we did exactly that after September 11. 

Why do we imagine other people love their children less, grieve less deeply, or remember less clearly? 

We have developed a horrifying talent for creating more terrorists than we will ever stop. We inflict suffering, evade responsibility, and then act as though the anger that follows came out of nowhere. 

Think back to the first time you saw one of those al Qaeda videos of an American being beheaded. Remember the sickness in your stomach. Remember the rage. Remember thinking that only savages would film a killing and send it out for the world to watch. Now ask yourself what the rest of the world will see when the camera is ours. 

Terrorist organizations stage executions for the cameras. Authoritarian regimes make death a public spectacle to feed fear and rage. Watching our own leaders reach for those same tools should force us to confront how much of ourselves we are surrendering in the name of defeating them. 

The line separating us from the people we condemn has to live in our conduct. A flag cannot hold it for us. Neither can a uniform, a title, or a declaration that we are the good guys. 

On that ICU floor, on a bloody street in Mosul, and in trauma bays across this country, people like my colleagues hold that line every day under circumstances most will never face. They keep monsters alive because their duty and their humanity are bigger than their hatred of what those monsters have done. 

Execute him if that's the sentence. But do it the way a confident nation does; quietly, lawfully, and without giving him the stage he always wanted. Let him be forgotten. 

I expect our leaders to show at least as much discipline as the nurses who had to care for him. 

They keep telling us they are defending what makes America different. Every day, they make that difference harder to see. 

Words of wisdom from Donald Trump

Here's a verbatim piece from Trump at a rally in New York tonight:

"And you know what they're doing? They go straight down, you know, you can make those drill bits talk. You can make 'em sing, you can make them go, they go down. New York's over here, Pennsylvania-- they go down and they take a sharp left. And they suck our oil out. Can you believe it? Lines of different states, and you'll see one has Cadillacs, because they like Cadillacs better than they like Mercedes, but one has an Escalade, and one has a 50 year old Chevy. And you're talking about 3 ft. It's a line that goes right up. One has some beautiful drilling plants, and one has no drilling plants, it's got no money, it's got poverty." 

If you can figure that out, let me know.