Conroy’s book, part memoir and part exposé and thriller, is based on his lived experience over decades of reporting on national security and the..drug trade. It emphasizes the vital role of authentic journalism in a landscape marked with manipulation and deceit by powerful entities, such as the CIA.

We're not at war, so a war crime is a stretch. And murdering folks who aren't U.S. nationals in international waters is not a crime in the US. And even if it was, Trump has absolute immunity and also can pardon anyone he sees fit to give a get-out-of-jail free card. Piracy seems the best fit.

This is the magic hen that is really running the MAGA Congress and also the brains behind White House policy choices. The hen is a master of a game found in Texas roadhouses called chicken-shit bingo, for real. And Trump holds all the cards. So, when the hen craps, MAGA politicians do too.

Unpacking the drug boat bloodshed.

Trouble in the land that locked up all the drug-traffickers and U.S. immigrants? Reuters Garcia Harfuch said Mexican airspace authorities had first detected the [drug] plane about 200 km (120 miles) south of San Salvador. A map he posted on X also showed the plane's flight path across the Pacific.

He's losing. So he riles up his WEIRD [White, Entitled, Immigrant-Hating, Racist, Divided] base to soothe his wretched soul and to wallow in their replacement-theory conspiracies. Plus, anger and impulse control erode with any number of brain curses at age 79. Vance on deck. Replacement theory.

There is no declared war by Congress, which is the only branch that can declare war under the Constitution. So, charges of a war crime don’t appear to fit the context — though international piracy might work, if it weren’t for the fact that would require declaring the U.S. Navy a pirate fleet. (1

Trump's new Western Hemisphere-first foreign policy is the old, failed Monroe Doctrine. The world is now far more complex than in the 1800s. Nukes and those with them wield global power. Hiding your head in the Western Hemisphere doesn't change that. A friendly neighbor is what we could be. Why not?

His taxes, the economy, the Epstein files, now the Drug Boat Murders. Trump promises but never delivers on transparency that threatens his power. So, he lies to conceal his stolen treasure and the lives destroyed by his many cruelties. But truth is an undertow that eventually drowns lies, even his.

It's worth remembering, as Trump ramps up his war on drugs for oil, that a large share of any US lives lost in the fray will be killed by guns sold in the US, both in recent years and left over from past US misadventures in Latin America. The drugs go north and the guns flow south, a river of iron.

The tell is in a later strike they rescued two survivors and returned them to their countries. Why kill the first two and not the next? They know it's murder. Trump's pardons and his immunity vs a career ended for disobeying an [illegal] order is the choice involved. SCOTUS made it so.

ICE has apparently discovered my neighborhood in Seattle. A neighbor sent me these. They were greeted with an appropriate salutation.

"ICE is trying to deport me to a sure death— not necessarily to cover up the fact that they don’t care about the lives lost [at the House of Death], but rather to confirm that theory. They DON’T care about the lives lost, and that is something even darker than we know within the U.S. government.”

Hegseth's F you to Congress. A 3-week pause, then boom! on the day the admiral is drilled about crimes he'd be pardoned for. (AP) U.S. Southern Command announced that it had conducted another strike against a..boat in the eastern Pacific..on Thursday, following a pause of almost three weeks.

I will say, Joy Reid owns her point of view, and she doesn't punch down. Both are critical in the journalism I respect. Plus, it's an easy format to navigate, though it's clear a lot of work went into compiling it. Notice, the formula for most MAGA pubs requires punching down and group think.

We saw the video of the first strike. What remained wasn't seaworthy. I'm unconvinced a radio would work after that strike. I'd need evidence of transmission to get me there. Then, if so, why not wait for the rescue boat to see if it tries to retrieve drugs? We have all the firepower. Why the rush?

This presentation was this evening for a small college in South Dakota. There 's still a thirst for knowledge out there, across the land. Build bridges and you build trust.

So, if narco-traffickers are now terrorists, then aren't the folks selling them the guns also terrorists? "The giant straw inhaling the drugs coming north is the United States, just like the river of iron (weapons of all calibers) raging south into Mexico and Latin America flows from the US."

If he has such strong beliefs in promoting homicide, why's he framing the admiral? WSJ It was a worldview shaped by his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as a soldier in the National Guard, where he told his platoon to ignore legal advice on rules of engagement he considered “nonsense.”

Under the Trump/Hegseth rules of war, every nation on the planet could start blowing up boats with no quarter on the theory they are preventing drug deaths. That would be the definition of a world war, as this UN global map shows.

We created a ticking time bomb, and it exploded on us. RS Lakanwal..inability to work due to missing immigration paperwork meant his family couldn’t afford rent or food..Lakanwal sought help..from a CIA program designed to aid Zero Unit veterans with immigration issues..His pleas..went unanswered.

Trump's pardon of this narco exposes his duplicity on drug trafficking and immigration. "After the coup, Honduras became the most violent country in the world.. Political assassinations spiked and..the country became one of the main sources of undocumented migrants fleeing to the United States."

Hegseth's toast if Congress does its job. [Liars lie] Trump said Hegseth told him “he did not say that, and I believe him, 100 percent.” [Just in case, throw him under the the bus] Trump said..“I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine."

With Venezuela, the smart money is on war. Shock and awe, then a grueling, bloody quagmire that will haunt us as a nation for years and cost us both blood and treasure. Nixon bombed Cambodia to cut Vietcong supply lines. That resulted in napalm hell and mass murder.Trump is on the same path.

Mass murder with no quarter.. WaPO As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck...The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack.. ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions..The two men were blown apart in the water.

The definition of blowback. WaPo The alleged gunman..came to the United States in..2021 after working for a CIA-organized counterterrorism squad. The Zero Units..were involved in dangerous and often deadly night raids and other missions to kill or capture members of the Taliban. wapo.st/3KmlQxP

Tacky is the artistic term used to describe the tastes of the current White House majordomo. The MAGA movement itself is awash in tackiness and unoriginality. Creative cheats who steal the worse ideas from even worse people. The White House will be remade again, with taste, once Trump is gone.

This article could have been just as easily written about addictions to potato chips or soda and it would be equally banal. The cases mentioned in the story, it seems to me, have far more to do with other underlying problems than weed. Reefer madness. The problem's not in us but in the evil weed.

When literal batcrap crazy Nazi plots are a normal part of the Trump era, we know it's time to stop the talk of finding common ground with the "other side." The only thing reasonable people can agree to here is that, if guilty as charged, these perps go to prison and see how slavery works there.

This is what we can expect from Trump's "drug war" He breaks it, he owns it. NYT The results showed that chaos and violence were likely to erupt within Venezuela, as military units, rival political factions and even jungle-based guerrilla groups jockeyed for control of the oil-rich country.

Coast Guard is under DHS. So, this makes sense. They are simply re-aligning their policy on fascist and hate symbols to keep pace with Border Patrol, ICE, and the private bounty hunters that they plan to deputize. Makes DHS white supremacists one big happy family with a revolving door.

The media should be on this hard. Privatizing the military via Blackwater didn't work out well in Iraq. DB News the department may now be going private with its nationwide migrant purge comes amid reports that more than a third of new ICE recruits are failing to pass the most basic fitness tests.

Trump's big Epstein stall has plenty of track yet. But the race to midterms has begun. As a military assault looms in Latin America, paramilitaries prowl our streets. Masses of people are starving, sick as the economy sinks. It's winter in America. For Trump, too.

This is a ticking time bomb. Trump's racist deportation dragnet is opening a back door to incalculable harms to victims of predators. He's also playing Russian roulette with our national security. NYT Today, the Trump administration has remade the agency into a veritable Department of Deportation.

In this email, Epstein is offering to help the Kremlin manipulate Trump. This is damning, knowing Epstein also claims to have had dirt on Trump.

What Trump really fears? “There are probably intelligence ties to our CIA and other foreign intelligence, and the American people would be shocked to know that our intelligence agency was working with a pedophile who was running a sex trafficking ring." — Republican Congressman Thomas Massie (Ky.

Alcohol kills far more people and ruins far more lives in this country than cocaine. But we aren't declaring Budweiser a terrorist organization and blowing up beer trucks.

Define working class. Define billionaires. An us vs. them ideological frame that falls apart when folks don't embrace that frame. A vision for the future is different. Example: Food, shelter, health care and equal opportunity as a floor — with all taxed progressively to maintain that floor.

Future Vision. The future unfolds in waves. It can echo the past but never be the past. Nor can it exist without the past. In terms of narrative, whoever controls the past can control the future. NYTs He has been especially critical — at times viciously so — of his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr..

If the cocaine/marijuana boat attacks launched in early September were really stopping drugs, how do we explain CBP cocaine seizures at the border exploding in September and cannabis seizures exploding in October, compared with months prior to the attacks. For every load caught, 2 get through?

This caving based on claims the goal was only to make Dem issues like health care salient, I call BS. The health care issue would have been there to claim without a shutdown. Just like now, folks still lose coverage. What this does is make Trump far more likely to order troops to shoot protesters.

All this pain and nothing gained? If Schumer can't stop it, he shouldn't be leader. Truth is, though, despite the failure of the Dem's if they cave here, this whole exercise was a failure of government. So, it's not a surprise if it ends in failure. But voter trust is a terrible thing to squander

This should be a hoot for most.

This is an interesting AP investigative piece on who a small number of the 70 killed to date are in Trump's war on boats. Yes, some boats were hauling illicit drugs, coke. But many of those onboard were fisherman or farmers or recently unemployed laborers, not battle-hardened "cartel soldiers." (1

The lesson of this tumultuous era in our history was revealed years ago by one of our great American writers. It's the lesson of all struggles for justice, dignity and peace. "Without courage, you can't practice any of the other virtues consistently." — Maya Angelou

First they gut FAA. Then they cut air capacity at the holiday season during a shutdown fight Trump's party forced because it's gutting health care and food assistance so billionaires can inject the nation's wealth. And then they gaslight us by saying the shutdown is causing it. I beg to differ.

NYT 11.4 A third option involves a..plan to send U.S. counterterrorism forces to seize control of..at least some of Venezuela’s oil fields.. My story 9.23 Oil is one of the major resources in the region that offers..great riches for those who control the land under which those reserves are found.

The fish rots from the head.

This all started with words written in chalk in front of Steven Miller's McMansion: “Stephen Miller is destroying democracy.” Now, local, state and fed agencies are battling over at best a misdemeanor case that has to overcome a 1st Amendment challenge. The chalk has not been charged.