Two facts:

✅Jensen Quote to team after 11/25 earnings: ““If we delivered a bad quarter, if we’re off by just a hair, if it just looked a little bit creaky, the whole world would’ve fallen apart… We’re basically holding the planet together — and it’s not untrue.”

✅According…
— Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) November 13, 2026

I don't know who wanted Jensen Huang out but I know that whoever it was wields extreme levels of power.

Nobody actually believes that, in the age of Donald J. Trump, very powerful people rapidly fall due to extramarital affairs, right? Even if accompanied by anonymous… https://t.co/4KyW338eoF
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 12, 2026

Senator John Kennedy just delivered the PERFECT description of the Nvidia-CPP sex spy scandal:

“This whole thing is an intergalactic FREAK SHOW!”

Kennedy was dropping one banger after another during his savage 90-second roast of the Nvidia CEO.

CNN’s Kasie Hunt teed him up by… https://t.co/uJzbt83BRK pic.twitter.com/e79UVIgL7y
— Overton (@overton_news) November 12, 2026

“President Trump Gives Extensive Interview to Stephen Smith.”

• An Unfiltered Conversation With President Trump (CTH)

Stephen A. Smith sits down inside the White House Roosevelt Room with President Donald Trump for a wide-ranging interview on the post-midterm landscape.

Topics include the GOP’s electoral losses, the ongoing conflict with Iran, rising gas and grocery prices, and the economic impact of sweeping tariffs. The conversation also dives deep into Trump’s record with Black voters, HBCU funding, criminal justice reform, border security under Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Jensen Huang’s resignation from Nvidia.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro: Inside the White House Roosevelt Room
1:11 Analyzing the 2026 Midterm Election Losses
5:45 Ken Paxton, John Cornyn & GOP Primary Endorsements
8:47 The War with Iran, Nuclear Threats & Gas Prices
16:16 How Tariffs Are Bringing Back U.S. Manufacturing

19:18 Debating “Fake News” & Political Messaging
25:33 Trump’s Record with Black Voters & HBCU Funding
27:45 Criminal Justice Reform & Alice Marie Johnson’s Story
36:24 Hypothetical Matchup: Donald Trump vs. Barack Obama
38:31 Border Security & Chief of Staff Stephen Miller
44:24 Jensen Huang Steps Down at Nvidia (Tim Cook Suggestion)
46:28 How Trump Will Spend His Last 2 Years in Office

It will be a flood. It’s all they have. They still have no leader.

• White House Warns Democrats Over Trump Probes (RT)

Will Scharf

The White House’s top lawyer has warned the House Democrats that their plans to investigate the administration of US President Donald Trump “may cross the line into blatant criminality.”

The dispute follows a pledge by the Democrats to launch a broad series of investigations into the Trump administration after winning control of the House of Representatives in last week’s midterm elections. The probes are expected to focus on alleged corruption, conflicts of interest, and abuses of power.
In a three-page letter issued on Wednesday to incoming House Oversight Committee chairman Robert Garcia, White House counsel Will Scharf argued that congressional investigations must remain within constitutional limits, adding that Garcia and members of the new Congress have “evinced a clear intent to transgress” them. The letter accuses Democrats of “abusive and capricious threats” against Trump and members of his administration.
Garcia pushed back, saying Congress has the constitutional authority to conduct oversight independently of the White House and will not be deterred by “baseless threats” from the administration or the Justice Department. He argued that voters gave the Democrats a mandate “to root out corruption and abuse.”
The latest exchange comes a week after Garcia issued a blunt warning of his own. On election night, after projections showed Democrats would take control of the House, he addressed the incoming Congress with a two-word message: “Lawyer up.”
Last week, Garcia also outlined several areas Democrats intend to investigate, including what he described as corruption within the Trump family, corporate misconduct, alleged abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. He also intends to examine the Trump family’s business dealings, including cryptocurrency and mineral deals, as well as construction projects at the White House.
Commenting on the plans at the time, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said Trump is willing to work with Democrats to deliver results for Americans, but warned that pursuing “sham investigations” and “radical-left policies” would mean acting “against the American people.”
Outgoing Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Trump critic, told AP on Wednesday that he hopes the Democrats focus on real issues rather than “stupid things” such as the Russiagate inquiry, an investigation based on debunked claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia. Massie, who recently lost his primary to a Trump-backed Republican challenger, said he believes there is “real corruption” involving the president and the people around him.

“How Jensen’s Fall Clears The Way For A Federal Crackdown…”

Will we ever know the real story?

I don’t buy the affair one.

Here’s two good takes, from Zero Hedge and Yves Smith.

• The Last Man Defending ‘Open’ AI Just Left The Building (ZH)

Four months ago, Jensen Huang was the most powerful voice in Washington arguing that Americans should be allowed to download AI models and run them on their own hardware.

This morning he resigned as Nvidia’s CEO, and he gave up his board seat too. A few hours earlier, The Information reported that Alice Huang (no relation), the former Megaspeed executive whom US intelligence believes was recruited by Beijing, had promised Nvidia chips to DeepSeek, the Chinese lab whose open-weight models have been eating American lunch (and tokens) all year.
We summed up what that means in one line:

*ALICE HUANG PROMISED NVIDIA CHIPS TO DEEPSEEK: INFORMATION

If you haven't set up your own open-weight system yet, you soon won't be able to.
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 12, 2026

Back in September we laid out the motive in “Here Lies The Motive: AI Leaders’ Cunning Plan Exposed”: terrify the public, demand emergency regulation, make compliance expensive, crush the competitors, consolidate. What that playbook was missing was a villain the public could actually picture. It now has one, and the villain sits squarely between Nvidia’s chips, a Chinese spy and DeepSeek’s open weights.
So, a thought experiment, with the same caveat we gave in September: the facts are real, the conclusion is interpretation. Nobody needed to plan the Jensen scandal for it to work as if it had been planned. And the way it works is by making a federal restriction on open models far easier to pass.

The Loudest Voice For Open Weights Just Went Silent
Rewind to July. After Moonshot’s Kimi K3 sparked another “DeepSeek moment” for US AI stocks, the administration started weighing restrictions on Chinese open models. Huang responded by organizing the opposition. On July 24, 25 companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Mistral and Hugging Face published “Open Weights and American AI Leadership,” and Huang used his first-ever X post to amplify it. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google did not sign.
Four days later he was on Capitol Hill, meeting lawmakers and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, then telling reporters that “for the American industry, we need open weight for security, we need open weight for safety.” Nvidia launched an industry coalition (the Open Secure AI Alliance) and kept shipping its own open Nemotron models. Washington blinked: the August 4 White House testing framework exempted open-weight models entirely.
That defender now has no role at Nvidia whatsoever. Goldman’s Jim Schneider, who cut his price target to $220 from $300 this morning in his note on the management transition (available to pro subs), puts it in terms an analyst can say out loud:
“We believe that going forward, it may be more difficult for the company to negotiate new multi-party investments among ecosystem partners at the same scale it has done up to this point… We believe Nvidia’s operations in certain jurisdictions could face more scrutiny going forward.”
Translation: the company that bankrolled the open-weight lobby now has to spend every ounce of its political capital proving it isn’t a Chinese export-control sieve. Interim CEO Colette Kress, a CFO, is about the last person to go picking fights with Congress over Hugging Face.
From Honeypot To DeepSeek: How A Sex Scandal Became An Open-Weight Story
Until this week, “ban open models” was a hard sell because the harms were abstract: benchmark gaps, jailbreak scores and distillation accusations. The White House’s Michael Kratsios alleged in July that Moonshot had distilled Anthropic’s Fable, which is not exactly the kind of thing that moves a swing-district voter.
Now look at the chain the scandal has laid out in a single week:
• Megaspeed, the Singapore firm Alice Huang helped run, reportedly bought over $4.8 billion of Nvidia chips in two years, with nearly $2 billion installed in Malaysian and Indonesian data centers that allegedly serve Chinese customers remotely;
• Bloomberg reported Monday that Moonshot (the Kimi lab) is renting Nvidia’s top AI chips in China, and today that Alibaba rents Nvidia chips through Megaspeed;
• and this morning, the alleged spy reportedly promised Nvidia chips to DeepSeek.

In other words, the three Chinese labs dominating the open-weight leaderboards are now all, in one way or another, in the same news cycle as smuggled American silicon and a suspected MSS asset. For a hawk, the story writes itself: Chinese open weights are built on stolen chips and distilled American models, then handed back to US startups for free. A year ago you needed a whiteboard to explain that. Now you need a tabloid front page.
And the scandal has already reached the Cabinet. As we reported earlier today, Treasury’s Scott Bessent reportedly confronted Lutnick in the Situation Room, asking why Megaspeed still isn’t on the Entity List (“I Don’t Know”). Per Axios, Trump signed off on action against chip diversion three times this year, and Lutnick held it up each time. The man who was slow-walking the crackdown is now the one under the microscope. That’s the kind of pressure that usually ends with somebody being seen to do something, and fast.

“Bigger Governance and Coming Financial Train Wreck than Hank Greenberg Exit from AIG..”

• Jensen Huang Ouster at Nvidia (Yves Smith)

There is considerable informational fog around the departure of Jensen Huang from Nvidia. As we’ll show, there are credible takes that even though the proximate cause was Huang’s affair with Alice Huang of Megaspeed, not so much the “sex with Chinese spy part” but the sale of ~$5 billion of chips to Chinese companies that violated US restrictions that the Trump Administration had taken not to enforcing. We will not focus today on the political/geopolitical part of this unraveling, so forgive us if any comments there are less than exact or out of date.

However, it appears that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had alerted Trump to the sales to China, and neither was happy about them.1 The escalation appears to have come about via a leak from government sources to the New York Times. The post-midterms timing is telling. The China hawks apparently did not want to make their play sooner, perhaps to prevent blowback the polls and with Mr. Market. But having this news-bomb blow up right before the Trump-Xi meeting on November 18 and 19 must be close to perfect from their vantage.
What is striking about the Huang exodus is that even with plenty of alarmed commentary about what this means for the circular financing on which the AI industry has come to depend, even the critical analysis, w with Ed Zitron the head of that pack, are behind on processing the implications of information that is in their faces. As bad as that for the near-term future, it is not just that AI has lost the moving force behind its key funding mechanism, of Nvidia engaging in complex money-shuffles that have had the effect of keeping all the wobbling plates still spinning atop their sticks.
It is that Nvida, like another industry-leading giant AIG in the long Hank Greenberg era (37 years as CEO, compared to 33 for Huang at Nvidia), despite its size, was completely depended on its leader to make decisions. It is not simply that Huang had no succession plan. It’s that getting anything important done will quickly start to go chaotic.
And Nvidia has vastly less inertia than AIG, where enormous amounts of premium revenue kept rolling in the door, day in, day out, and in the normal course of events, an insurer can easily paper over problems by not paying claims.
Remember that no one in the runup to the crisis had the dimmest idea that AIG would become the biggest of the “too big to fail” entities. $180 billion was laundered though it to make good on its credit default swaps to salvage major financial firms like Goldman.3 By contrast, Ed Zitron and many others have repeatedly raise the alarm about Nvida’s ultimately-impenetrable-by-design circular financing schemes. See this chart from Bloomberg:

The whole point of this exercise is to re-use already scarce equity, make it impossible to unravel the economics, and (by accident or design), lash all the key players together in a big money mosh pit. The best analogy we have come up with is rehypothecation, the repeated re-pledging and re-leveraging of securities. It was a device used by Lehman to put off its sell-by date, making its crash worse and dragging even more players under.
More and more commentators are pointing to dodgy accounting and the board’s increasing concern with the way Nvidia was financing customer sales, as the trigger for Huang’s exit, even if the spy allegations and now two additional affairs generated more scrutiny (see the Daily Mail in Philandering former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had third mistress who also worked with him at tech giant report claims).
From the Tech Report with Ed Zitron:

From a lightly-edited machine transcript:
Zitron: He [Huang] ran a company and most importantly, he very clearly ran a large illegal GPU smuggling operation shipping billions of dollars of GPUs to China. So, first of all, there could be criminal action. The DOJ is already investigating Jensen Hong, Nvidia, Super Micro, and all sorts of other things. What it means for Nvidia is also, I think, a slowdown, if not stop, to the circular financing.
Colette Kress, the CFO, who is now the CEO, specifically was arguing with Jensen Sprogs because multiple Jensen children work at Nvidia who were pushing for these circular financing deals.
Colette Kress pushed back against the backs stop on OpenAI’s data center in Ohio. So I think that this will be a level setting for this company. But also crucially, I don’t think Colette Kress has the stones of Jensen Huang to do this amount of dodgy or outright illegal stuff. So I think that this is a big change for a company that has grown, depending on who you ask, as much as 20% of its revenue from selling chips to countries that are sanctioned by the US government….
But the thing I need people to take home is this is not about the affairs. The affairs are the flash point. They are the salacious detail. What this is about is this GPU smuggling operation…”
_____________
To understand why this is a big deal, you need to understand the AI funding loop.
Here is how it works:
1. Nvidia puts money into an AI company, or guarantees its loans and leases.
2. That company uses the money and credit to build a data center.
3. The data center is filled with Nvidia GPUs.
4. Nvidia reports those GPU sales as revenue.
5. If the company cannot rent out all its computing power, Nvidia agrees to buy the unused part.

SO NVIDIA IS THE INVESTOR, THE LENDER, THE SUPPLIER AND THE BACKUP CUSTOMER, ALL IN THE SAME DEAL.
The money goes out of Nvidia and comes back to Nvidia as sales.
CoreWeave is the clearest example. Nvidia owns a stake in it, sells it chips, and agreed to buy up to $6.3 billion of its unused computing capacity through 2032.
OpenAI is the biggest. Nvidia is guaranteeing up to $105 billion for its Ohio data center, supplying all the chips inside it, and invested $1.5 billion in the company building it.
Nvidia’s own filing for the quarter ending July 26 shows where the money is tied up:
• Supply commitments for memory and chip wafers: $279 BILLION, up from $119 billion.
• Guarantee on the OpenAI Ohio data center: up to $105 BILLION.
• Deals to buy unused cloud capacity from neoclouds: $36 BILLION.

Nvidia’s actual liabilities on its balance sheet: $91 BILLION.
That means the commitments outside the balance sheet are almost 6 times bigger than the debts on it.

Why does Trump bow down to whoever it is that wants Jensen Huang gone?

• Trump Backs Former Apple CEO Cook To Lead Chipmaker Nvidia (JTN)

President Donald Trump on Thursday backed former Apple CEO Tim Cook to lead Nvidia, hours after the disgraced founder, president and CEO of the technology company, Jensen Huang, resigned.

Trump’s statement on the Truth Social platform was his first public comment on the departure of Huang, who resigned amid an investigation into an extramarital relationship with a woman whom U.S. intelligence agencies concluded was spying for China, then allegations of an affair with a company executive who reported to him.
Nvidia is a chip making firm that has been integral to the AI revolution. Jensen’s downfall in recent days has rippled through the Big Tech industry and financial markets. Trump had backed Jensen, a big donor, amid the intelligence report.
“NOW THAT Nvidia CEO JENSEN HUANG, who has done a fantastic job, has resigned, there is only one man to take his place – TIM COOK of Apple. A Legend replaces a Legend!” Trump said in the post.

“The Iran reassignment may signal a deeper rift—and a very different Republican field in 2028.”

Trump vs the Vance/Tucker Carlson combo.

• Trump Sends JD Vance To The Political Sideline (Andrea Widburg)

On November 4, the day after the misbegotten midterms, Vice President JD Vance, reportedly without input from the White House, tweeted an attack on the Iran War and on Israel to excuse the Democrat tsunami. On November 12, President Trump politely announced that Vance was off the Iran beat. Moving forward, Vance’s new job is to focus on an old job he’s been good at: catching corruption across America (mostly in blue states) that drains federal coffers.

There’s a lot to unpack, including the implications for the war and for the 2028 election. Not only is this a powerful rebuke, whether for Vance’s performance in Iraq or for his disloyalty, but it also sends two other messages: First, that Vance is not ready for prime time, because he still lacks the foreign policy chops in a dangerous world; and second, that Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio are going to end the war very quickly.
The chronology is simple: President Trump announced a two-week ceasefire on April 7. That short pause rolled right into a much longer one so JD Vance could lead peace talks with Iran. At the time, it kind of made sense because the U.S. had seemingly decimated Iran’s military infrastructure, so it seemed as if the phrase “peace talks” was D.C. code for a negotiated surrender.
Six months later, we are still officially in the “peace talks” phase of the war. During those same six months, Iran regrouped and got increasingly arrogant. Meanwhile, going into the election, the Democrats and the Tucker wing of the Republican Party were able to use Iran to explain everything they claim is wrong with Republicans. In other words, the “peace talks”—not the war itself—were a substantial factor in the Democrat sweep.
It’s true that Trump is successfully strangling Iran’s economy. But the mainstream media, which still wields inordinate power in shaping American political beliefs, didn’t report that. There was no victory by the midterms. Instead, there were pointless peace talks that devolved into a stalemate, even though by April, we had Iran by the short hairs. The optics stank.
Now, it’s entirely possible that Vance really wasn’t at fault here. Some say that, thanks to our sending our weapons to Ukraine, we quickly ran out of weapons to continue fighting in Iran. If these rumors are true, not only is America unequipped for a two-front war, but we can’t even handle a one-front war.
Also, Trump is the big boss. He could have pulled the plug on these drawn-out “peace talks,” but he didn’t. That’s on him, not on Vance.
Where Vance gets 100% of the blame, though, is the tweet he put out the day after the midterms explaining what he believes happened. According to him, a really good but unnamed pollster (“one of the smartest people I know in politics”), the problem lay with four things:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel

In other words, evil Israel is directing America’s foreign policy and forcing us into an endless war that makes prices too high. I couldn’t find any actual published poll with that information. However, it tracked perfectly with what Tucker Carlson has been saying.
Carlson, who once presented a measured, centrist, somewhat amusing and sardonic conservative viewpoint on Fox News, has morphed into a sweaty, cackling, pro-Islamist, anti-American, antisemitic nutcase. And Vance, rather than politely distancing himself from Carlson (e.g., “I appreciate all he did for me, but I cannot support his current values”), refuses to do so.
Trump first responded to Vance’s tweet by reiterating what he’d already said on Tuesday night, as results came in; namely, that the Iran war was a factor. However, after Vance’s tweet, even though Trump acknowledged that temporarily higher gas prices (which have now dropped spectacularly) may have been part of the problem, he strongly stated that he’d do it all over again to save the world from a nuclear Iran.
That was temperate for Trump. Today, the hammer dropped, although Trump dropped it very diplomatically. He announced that Vance is off Iran (“We don’t need a deal with Iran”), and that Vance has a new gig —the same as his old gig: focus on ending state corruption that drains federal funds, and that’s it:
I agree with Cynical Publius’s take on the matter:

The mistake was believing that the mullahs of Iran would ever possibly engage in good faith negotiations. This was a naive mistake of monstrous proportions.

The political price has been paid. Trump, Rubio and Hegseth will now bring this to a close with an iron fist. pic.twitter.com/zqLdFANsgm
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) November 12, 2026

I don’t think Trump likes Vance very much now, and I don’t see him supporting him in the 2028 election if Vance runs. However, Trump must tread very carefully, because Vance has been inside the Trump White House and can retaliate with very harmful things. If he does that, whether they’re truthful or not, the all-powerful media will make sure every American knows what Vance had to say.
I’d like to see Vance decide that, for his children’s sake, he won’t run. At that point, we’ll have an embarrassment of riches to choose from in 2028: Marco Rubio, the statesman; Pete Hegseth, the warrior; and Ron DeSantis, the super administrator. One way or another, I want to see all three of them show up in a newly elected 2028 Republican presidential win.

“Remarkable Video Kremlin Allows Media to Record.”

• 30 Minutes of Discussion Between Putin, Witkoff and Kushner (CTH)

I guarantee you two things. First, there are dozens of U.S. intelligence analysts feveriously watching this video of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin engaged in discussion with U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kusher. Second, most of the analysts will get their interpretations wrong.

Beyond the unusual and remarkable transparency of Russia allowing the media to witness and record some very substantive points being made, the animated nature of Vladimir Putin [15:00 forward] is not customary for him. Putin is normally stoic in his body language and does not usually animate his words with his hands; in this discussion he does.
After the formalities and diplomatic niceties expressed by Putin, he gets right down to business asking both Witkoff and Kushner to summarize their perspectives on the recent Abu Dhabi talks. You can see Kushner caught off guard when asked to answer a question -specificicity- that would normally not be asked during public moments [14:45].
I can tell you from experience in studying Russian’s close up over a long timeframe, President Putin is frustrated at the remarks from the U.S. side because Russia doesn’t culturally engage in ‘blah, blah, blah.’ You see this when Putin talks about the “grey zones” that are stunningly antithetical to the mindset of any Russian.
In Russia there is Yes or No, there is not this western talk of ‘maybe.’
In Russia there are clear boundaries in almost everything. There is yours and mine, there is no ours. There is right and wrong, there is no “kinda.” When a Russian has something to say, they say it – and there is a point to it, a specific point. Russians approach things with a ‘do’ or ‘do not’ perspective, it is just their culture.
President Putin, just like any other Russian, is not being curt or rude, he is being direct. Say or don’t say, but do not talk circles about maybe saying or maybe doing; it will piss off a Russian quickly. Do or do not, but don’t talk about doing for the sake of talking about doing. You either do, or don’t – that’s it.
The failure of Americans or western viewers to understand the Russian mindset leads to poor analysis of what Russia says and does. Russians seem rude to western eyes and ears, but they are not – they’re just very direct and they don’t engage in small talk about anything. Everything a Russian says has a point to it, or they just don’t say anything. With that in mind, watch the video:

Is France’s budget-policy paralysis blowing across the border into Belgium?

• Belgium: Europe’s Next Debt Flashpoint (Thomas Kolbe)

In the shadow of France’s sovereign debt crisis, other smoldering fires threaten to become a raging blaze. In Belgium, things could come to a flashpoint that sets the entire eurozone alight.

Among the many catastrophic lessons of the great financial and sovereign debt crisis more than a decade ago, one came as a surprise: it is not the size of an economy that determines the outbreak of a sovereign debt crisis. It was tiny Greece, accounting for just 2.5 percent of the eurozone’s total economic output, that came within a hair’s breadth of blowing the union apart from within. At the time, Greece’s sovereign debt reached 170 percent of GDP. Austerity was then the order of the day, and given the country’s homogeneous population and undeniable state lethargy, it was ultimately accepted.
But things hung by a thread. For in the eurozone, states are chained together through the bond market. The EU, and above all the eurozone, is simply not a federation like the United States. Debt consolidation under the leadership of the European Commission may be Brussels’ goal, but given the growing tensions on the continent, it is likely to remain an illusion.
Brussels has long been using an instrument that points in this direction: through NextGenerationEU, the Commission raises joint funds on the capital markets in order to make them available to member states in the form of grants and loans. Countries such as Spain and Italy in particular benefit from this. The political trick is to increasingly cushion national financing problems through joint debt and EU funds. Joint liability is thus growing not necessarily through an open decision in favor of a debt union, but gradually through new financing instruments.
In Brussels, it has been recognized: in the event of a crisis, a fragmented capital market exacerbates the problem. If one member comes under pressure in the bond market, speculators shift their capital in cascades through the ranks of the fiscally weakest members, setting off a domino effect. Moreover, the construct stands and falls with the creditworthiness of the Federal Republic of Germany — and lately, that is no longer in such good shape either.
Much has recently been said about France’s political paralysis and its sovereign debt, growing at an annual rate of more than five percent, which is likely to reach more than 120 percent of economic output by the end of the year. A financial catastrophe is quite obviously brewing here, one that even a doubled Federal Republic of Germany in better years could hardly cope with out of its own economic strength.
France is undoubtedly currently the biggest problem in the euro debt club. And it remains to be seen whether a possible President Marine Le Pen could turn the fiscal tide — or whether the Germans would be drawn more strongly into joint liability in order to steer Europe’s second-largest economy into calmer waters after all. Right next door, to the north, a similar financial catastrophe is brewing in comparatively manageable Belgium.
Belgium’s budget deficit this year is well above the long-expired Maastricht criteria and is likely to come in at around 5.2 percent of economic output. The national debt has piled up to more than 110 percent of GDP. Belgium’s situation looks fatal. All the more so as Prime Minister Bart De Wever has crashed and burned with his consolidation plans. A savings plan worth billions was planned up to 2029, but it failed because the coalition fell out over which social groups should ultimately foot the bill for the reform policy.
While some in the alliance are pushing for spending cuts, others are calling for tax increases and a greater burden on wealth and capital. For Belgium is not simply a country with a budget hole. It is a state whose federal architecture has splintered fiscal responsibility between Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels. While thrifty Flanders insists on cuts, the more free-spending Wallonia demands protection from the fiscal axe. Every austerity policy thus quickly becomes a regional power struggle, a test for the entire federal system.
In Belgium, different fiscal policy views collide, further straining the deep fault lines between the regions. De Wever offered his resignation on November 2nd, thereby making the blockade visible. King Philippe initially did not accept the resignation, but instead instructed the prime minister to enter new negotiations. A solution to the fiscal bottleneck still remains up in the air.
It almost seems as if France’s budget-policy paralysis is blowing across the border into Belgium. In this way, the crisis is approaching the country in whose capital the center of power of the EU is located. Belgium appears — as the home of the EU institutions — like the fated place of the looming crisis.
What is more, it is strangely ironic that it is precisely in Brussels, with Euroclear, that the custodian for a large proportion of the frozen Russian central bank assets is based. The enemy’s state treasure — within reach and yet so far away. No one has yet dared to commit this fatal breach of the law, to access Russian state assets in order to postpone their own financial problems, at least for a time.
Belgium’s internal fragmentation and fiscal vulnerability are also reflected in the financial markets. The yield on Belgian ten-year government bonds rose from around 3.5 to 4.25 percent within a few months. This is unmistakable consolidation pressure: the markets, investors, banks and pension funds are demanding that the overstretched state apparatus, with a state share of around 54 percent of GDP, be consolidated, that the welfare state be cut back and that the excessive taxes be reduced to a normal level. In terms of the burden on the average earner through taxes and social security contributions, Belgium is the OECD leader.
If consolidation fails — and at present there is little to suggest that it could succeed — Belgium too will be drawn into a debt vortex of higher interest rates, rising refinancing costs and growing risk premiums, which could ultimately lead to the collapse of public finances.
Like so many European states, Belgium suffers from a postmodern illusion: that an oversized welfare state is indispensable, that the state must take responsibility for the economy and the distributional processes of a society — down to regulating the details of everyday existence. The costs of this policy are now coming to light. And they could ultimately culminate in a major sovereign debt crisis that would burst the illusions of state omnipotence and the belief in the state’s ability to shape society.

“‘Europe’ now has a seat at the negotiating table, if only its leaders could decide what they want to say and who could say it.”

Kaja Kallas, unelected and picked solely for hating Putin, says it’s her.

But she’s just Ursula2.

• Why The EU Can’t Find Its Putin Envoy (RT)

Alexander Stubb, Radoslaw Sikorski, and Ursula von der Leyen

In their most recent talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner apparently secured a place for ‘Europe’ at the negotiating table with Russia. European leaders will have to overcome deep factional divides and square away their most ideologically-driven fantasists to have any influence over the talks.

“The Europeans will join at the next meeting, which we consider to be a very important moment,” Witkoff told reporters in Moscow on Thursday, before he and Kushner departed for Ireland to brief Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and his EU backers.
The Kremlin has not set a date for the next round of talks, nor has Moscow confirmed the precise extent of European participation. However, as Kushner pointed out the previous day, Europe has a more immediate problem on its hands : “If Europe could identify one person to speak on their behalf,” he said, “that would be a bigger achievement than getting the Russians to include them in the negotiation.”
The US president’s son-in-law is not the first American to express bewilderment at the absence of a common voice in Europe, and there will likely be much talk around this question now that the invitation has been secured by US President Donald Trump’s diplomatic team.. So who is “Europe”?
Rumsfeld’s “New Europe”
After Danish Foreign Minister Knud Borge Andersen met with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on behalf of the nine-member EEC in 1973, Kissinger complained that Andersen seemed to speak for Europe, but lacked any real authority to do so. “We seem to be talking to those who can’t negotiate and those who can negotiate won’t talk to us,” he remarked.
Three decades later, Donald Rumsfeld faced staunch opposition from Belgium, France, and Germany as he attempted to drum up European backing for the invasion of Iraq. However, he received salivating support from Britain, Italy, Poland, and the so-called ‘Vilnius Ten’ – a Baltic and Eastern European bloc that enthusiastically signed up to combat “the nexus of terrorism and dictators with weapons of mass destruction.”
The newbies, Rumsfeld figured, were the only Europeans worth talking to. “You’re thinking of ‘Europe’ as Germany and France,” he told a reporter six weeks before the war. “I don’t. I think that’s old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east.”
Who is “Europe” now?
The fault lines identified by Rumsfeld are still visible, and there are three broad camps competing for the position of “voice of Europe.”
• The realists

Giorgia Meloni and Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris

‘Europe’ and ‘foreign policy realism’ rarely appear in the same sentence these days, but among some of “old Europe’s” leaders, there is a realization that the continent will have to acknowledge the limits of its pro-Ukraine stance and take part in talks before it is overtaken by them.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni could be considered figureheads, with Macron proposing last December that Europe find an envoy “in the coming weeks.” Meloni declared that the French president “is right on this,” and that “if Europe decides to take part in this phase of negotiations by talking only to one of the two sides, I fear that in the end the positive contribution it can make will be limited.”
Even German Chancellor Friedrich Merz – despite pivoting his economy into militarization mode and demanding the EU steal billions of Russian sovereign assets – has called on the bloc to “find a balance again with our largest European neighbor.”
Finnish President Alexander Stubb, floated in EU-funded media as a possible envoy to Moscow, along with Meloni, joined Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store to call Putin last month.
“Realism” is a relative term here. All of the aforementioned leaders remain committed to arming Ukraine and pushing for peace on Kiev’s terms, while support for the theft of Russia’s assets remains strong across the EU. Stubb and Store offered “no change in Europe’s approach” to Ukraine during their phone call, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever has also placed himself in the realist camp, arguing that seizing the €210 billion ($236 billion) worth of Russian assets, a move he has blocked, would collapse trust in the European financial system.
• The maximalists
The golden children of Rumsfeld’s “new Europe” are full-throttle maximalists. They consider any talks with Russia a betrayal of Ukraine, and remain determined to fight, as Putin has said, “to the last Ukrainian.”
Their poster boy, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, reacted with shock when Kushner announced last week that he and Trump were working on an agreement that would “address the security concerns of all sides” in Europe. Evidently fearing that some of the realists had signaled support for this agreement, he told reporters that “the last thing we want is Western Europe dealing with Russia, over the heads of the east Europeans.”
The belief that Ukraine can inflict a military defeat on Russia is a core tenet of European maximalism. Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics made this clear in 2024 when he openly stated “Russia must be destroyed.” Sikorski’s calls for “aggressive” NATO exercises to destabilize Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad, former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis’ demand that NATO leaders remove “all red lines and de-escalation policies” on Russia, and Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal’s likening of Putin to a “rat in a corner” are just three examples of the maximalist rhetoric radiating from Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
Moscow views these “new Europeans” as hysterical, reactionary, and paranoid. Even the US has told them to pipe down, with Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby reportedly ordering the Baltic states last month not to “make noise” and stop “poking” Russia.
To the maximalists, even symbolic outreach to Moscow is unconscionable. After Stubb and Store spoke to Putin last month, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen complained that the call had “not been coordinated with the rest of us,” referring to a group reportedly including her and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, two of the most hardline anti-Russian voices in the EU.
• The fantasists
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas wield significantly more power than their predecessors did when Rumsfeld toured Europe in 2003. Von der Leyen has no electorate to answer to, has the power to borrow money for Ukraine on the EU’s behalf, and can propose new funding mechanisms for Kiev.
However, the Commission still counts on unanimity among the EU’s member states to approve its loans, aid packages, and sanctions, and it has no military power to back up its diktats and proclamations. What it has are appeals to fantasy. Von der Leyen has insisted that the EU have veto power over any potential peace deal negotiated between Moscow, Kiev, and Washington, that Ukraine be allowed to keep its pre-conflict borders, and that Moscow be forced to pay reparations to Kiev.
Kallas’ position is even more loosely tethered to reality, with her repeated calls for representation at the negotiating table interspersed with quotes from Marvel superhero movies – “Europeans, assemble!” – and threats to dismember Russia into “many smaller nations.”
The hubris of Von der Leyen and Kallas has ruled them out as negotiators – both in the eyes of the Kremlin and their fellow Europeans. “How can you discuss anything with Kaja Kallas?” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov remarked to reporters earlier this year. Brussels, he added, is full of “semi-literate, incompetent functionaries.”
A reckoning in Dublin
European Council President Antonio Costa has promised to discuss the creation of an envoy during talks at the EU’s summit in Dublin this week. However, the bloc’s leaders are unlikely to come to any agreement, an EU spokesperson told Germany’s DW on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the US is not the only actor losing patience. On the eve of the summit, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky issued his European patrons an ultimatum: “We need to choose who will represent Europe in the negotiations,” he said, demanding that this decision be made “no later than the end of November.”

“Sometimes things are happening that are bigger than what the headline flow suggests.” —Tom Luongo, Gold, Goats and Guns

• Villainy Abides (James Howard Kunstler)

The Party of Victims (a.k.a., the Democratic Party), the so far designated “winners” of the midterm election, spent the past week talking smack to the country about how they aim to go after the president and everyone in his cabinet. . . impeachment-o-rama. . .persecutions. . . a veritable Grand Guignol of Jacobin-style political bloodletting in the next Congress — until Mr. Blanche, the attorney general, had to remind them that such an agenda seemed to lack legislative purpose, implying that this is how punks talk.

Chatter overheard out of the White House bespeaks a hearty debate about how to handle these garish threats. Does the president try to play nice with such a pack of rabid animals? Or is it time for Mr. Trump to channel his inner Harry Callahan? You must think the answer is self-evident, but it kind of turns on what reputable detectives can discern about the propriety of the election that put them in Congress, or lack of such.
You could not contrive a more excessively convoluted balloting process than our fifty states of the union have come up with. The many complex layers between registration, casting, and counting of ballots, plus the intervention of computerized tabulation machines, scream of vast openings to manipulation and fraud. There are many sound theories about what happened this time to produce such a suspiciously uniform “blue shift” in so many places with stark regional and demographic differences, from Mississippi to Minnesota.
And, of course, the basic numbers have a fishy bouquet: Nationwide, Republicans were down about 5-million votes from the previous midterm and Democrats ended about 15-million votes up. Many suspect there is a correlation between the huge Democratic Party increase and the fact that some 20-million illegal immigrants were allowed to rush the border under the sketchy regime of “Joe Biden,” given Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, and nicely prepped to pretend to be US citizens.
The Democratic Party has a designated election field marshal, one Marc Elias, attorney-at-lawfare, devoted to the scientific gaming of our hyper-complex election procedures, plus help from scores of well-funded NGOs to provide muscle in his field operations, which entailed materializing hordes of new voters, many of them non-citizens and others completely made-up, fake. Was AI used to assemble all those new voters out of state rolls that included the dead, and voters who had moved to other states? And then, were nefarious algorithms at work to engineer outcomes in those states’ tabulation machines?
You might suppose that aside from the appointment of Stephen Miller as the new chief of staff, Mr. Trump has appeared strangely flaccid the past ten days in the face of what might have been a meticulously staged coup. Well, this is what you do when you watch your enemy maneuver in this battle-space. The first order of business is to establish whether there was any mischief in the voting apparatus.
Executive Order 13848 designates the ODNI to conduct an investigation on foreign interference in the vote and report to the president in 45 days after the election — meaning the week before Christmas. All the intel agencies in the executive branch are available to investigate: the FBI, CIA, DOW-Intel, Homeland Security, Treasury, etc., a swarm of very sophisticated crime detection, surely aided by AI.
Under their regular duties, beyond EO 13848, the agencies are not limited to looking for foreign interference. Where federal elections are involved — House and Senate seats — and probable cause exists, the FBI and DHS especially can investigate homegrown fraud and report criminal referrals to the attorney general at the DOJ.
The DOJ can move to prosecute state officials for federal crimes such as 18 U.S.C. § 241 (conspiracy against rights) and § 242 (deprivation of rights under color of law). 52 U.S.C. §§ 10307(c), 10307(e) and related Voting Rights Act criminal provisions cover false information in registration or voting, multiple voting, and related conspiracies when a federal candidate is on the ballot. 52 U.S.C. § 20511 also provides for fraudulent registration or related acts. State officials enjoy no general immunity from federal prosecution for violating these laws. The Supremacy Clause ensures that valid federal criminal statutes apply to state officers when the elements are met.
Under the Constitution, however, in contested elections, when January 3 rolls around, the old Congress officially ceases to exist and the new Congress ultimately can decide to seat itself without first being seated. Say, what. . . ? Try to imagine the scene where the election results have been discredited in several states, and dozens of state officials are subject to prosecution for election fraud — on top of the discovery, reported to the president by the DNI, that China, Cuba, and perhaps elements in and around the EU interfered in the midterm election. . . and Hakeem Jeffries gavels in the 120th Congress despite all that.
Does it sound like a recipe for crisis to you? And all because Senator John Thune could not find a way to pass the SAVE Act in the many months after the House passed it in April and sent it to him. Villainy abides.

None are left.

• The Erosion Over Time of America’s Founding Principles (Paul Craig Roberts)

The founding principles of the United States, including those embodied in the Constitution, have been taking hits for a long time. Where shall we begin? As this essay is instructional, not inclusive, let’s begin with Lincoln’s invasion of the Confederate States of America. Lincoln’s initiation of the most costly war in terms of lives in US history was a death blow to the principle of self-determination, the principle upon which the US was created.

The next step toward America’s destruction was taken when the right to vote was extended beyond its confinement to male property owners to all regardless of property ownership and the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave women the right to vote. These changes fundamentally changed the character of the American political system.
Our Founding Fathers knew their history. They understood from Plato and Aristotle that self-rule ends up in mob rule. After the death of Pericles the Demagogues led the Athenian Assembly into catastrophic and emotionally driven errors. Our founding fathers were familiar with the bread and circuses paid from the public purse to pacify the Roman mob. For this reason our Founding Fathers restricted governance to male property owners who had a stake in the system. Not only were most property owners male, but also the male gender was, and is today, regarded as more rational and less emotional than women. Doom always follows the triumph of emotion over rational thought.
The removal of the property restriction on voting created the American mob. Now political parties can increase their votes by agitating for subsidies paid to the deprived by “the rich,” a development that female empathy enabled–“oh, the poor dears.” By 1913 the subsidies required from property owners demanded an income tax, which resurrected slavery by giving government as representative of the public interest a claim to the labor and thereby income of Americans.
Few, if any, Americans know and understand that the historical definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. A medieval serf was not free, because he owed 20% and at times as much as 30% of his income to his feudal lord. In exchange in the initial centuries of the relationship the formerly free household received protection from marauding bands of Vikings, Saracens, and Huns or Magyars. As the threats receded, the serfs’ obligations remained.
A slave on a 19th century Caribbean or Southern US plantation or in South America owed the surplus of his labor over his own maintenance to his owner. Generally the tax rate was about 50%. What the 1913 income tax Amendment did was to re-enserf Americans and to turn them into slaves as the tax rates quickly rose and thresholds lowered.
Americans do not understand that they are slaves, because they think slaves were restricted in their movements. But in 18th and 19th century America everyone was restricted in their movements. There were no cars, buses, trains, airliners. To get anywhere over land required horses or walking, and the progress was slow for rich and poor alike.
Americans due to their historical indoctrination by white liberals do not understand that many slaves were leased out by owners to businesses in towns and were permitted to retain a part of the income they produced, which they used to purchase their freedom. Try to purchase your freedom from the IRS.
In 1913 an equally disastrous Constitutional Amendment was passed–the 17th Amendment. Until April 8, 1913, US senators were appointed by the state legislatures. This tied their interest to their state’s interest. Progressives, or more accurately destroyers, replaced this safeguard provided by our Founding Fathers with direct election of the US Senate. This fatal error brought money into politics. Now senators can be purchased, upheld by recent Supreme Court decisions as a First Amendment right, by organized interests from outside their state and even by foreign interests.
Today the US Senate is purchased by Big Pharma, Agri-business, AI corporations, Wall Street and the banks, and by foreign governments, such as the many US senators who support with American blood and money Americans fighting wars for Israeli hegemony over the Middle East.
Did the dumbshit progressives who created the situation in which money purchases the US Senate understand the unintended consequences? Did they understand, for example, that Americans would one day be fighting Israel’s wars for hegemony? Of course not. They were too stupid to understand anything. They were emoting like women. Yes, I know, I am not making friends with feminists, but truth cannot be sacrificed for feminists’ feeling or anyone else’s. If feelings prevail over truth, there is no point to anything.
It is a different story, but 1913 also brought Americans the Federal Reserve System, a central bank controlled by a few that has used its manipulation of inflation and unemployment to monopolize the US economy.
It was the stupid progressives who in their delusions thought that regulatory agencies would protect Americans health, food, and financial security. All regulatory agencies are captured by the industries that are supposed to regulate them. Big Pharma, for example, owns the FDA, CDC, NIH, and not even the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., can do anything about it. The ability of Big Pharma to purchase the House and Senate is more power than the Secretary of Health has.
By 1913 our Founding Fathers’ design of a government of separated powers, legislative, judicial, and executive, constrained by a Constitution that defined the USA was in tatters. It has worsened since.
To be brief, Congress has abandoned its own Constitutional right to permit or forbid the country being taken to war by the executive. The executive has a free hand as Trump’s attack on Iran for Israel demonstrates, as numerous previous attacks on foreign countries by US presidents have demonstrated.. The Trump regime also has demonstrated, as have governors and legislatures of 38 American states, total contempt for the First Amendment.
Trump illegally prevented US university students from protesting the Israeli genocide in Palestine. There are 38 US states, bought and paid for by the Israel Lobby, that refuse a government job or contract to any American citizen or business who participates in a boycott against Israel. In other words, Israel comes ahead of the First Amendment. So where is the power of the US Constitution?
The Constitution’s fate suffered even worse under the George W. Bush and Obama regimes. President Bush declared in violation of habeas corpus that he could detain American citizens indefinitely on suspicion alone without due process. President Obama declared that he had the right to execute American citizens on suspicion alone without due process, and he did so. These are impeachable offenses against the US Constitution. But no effort was made to defend the Constitution by impeaching either of the destroyers of the US Constitution, acts of high treason. The presidential attacks on the Constitution were explained as a national defense matter despite the fact that no national defense was involved..
So we have come to the point where destroying the US Constitution is a protective measure. We are said to be safer without the Constitution’s protections of liberty.
In the 1960s federal bureaucrat Alfred Blumrosen at the Orwellian named Equal Employment Opportunity Commission misused the 1964 Civil Rights Act to deny white males equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Blumrosen established an illegal and unconstitutional regime of race and gender preferences for university admission, employment and promotion called “affirmative action” that made white males second class citizens and assigned them to the back of the bus. Yet these second class citizens are said to have “white privilege.” After 61 years nothing has been done about this ongoing violation of the 14th Amendment.
Today who defends the US Constitution, or what little is left of it? Not the law schools. Not the media. Not Federal judges. Not the New York Times 1619 Project. Not Democrats, progressives, or the Democrat Socialists who are taking over the Democrat Party, and not even by American conservatives who are always willing, repeatedly, to sacrifice the Constitution to “national defense,” always a hoax.. The US Constitution has been redefined from being a protector of liberty to being an obstacle to change.
Generally speaking, revolutionaries are killed by their revolutions. The French Revolution “devoured its own children”, turning its radical Jacobin leadership into victims of the very mechanisms of state terror they had created. The Bolsheviks who led the Russian Revolution were destroyed by Stalin. Chinese Communists were victims of Mao’s purges. Abdul El-Sayed, Melat Kiros, and Alexndria Ocasio-Cortez will be victims of the revolution they are launching.
Revolutions unfold according to their own dynamic. When they run out of designated opponents, they find them in their own ranks. The poetic justice in this will not save America from destruction.
Flag-wavers have lost their country. Their insouciance made them incapable of defending America. Today America is abandoned without defenders, sacrificed to Israel and Democrat Socialist revolutionary aspirations.

Making the Supreme Court into a political toy.

• AOC Suggests Impeaching Conservative Justices for “Legalizing a Lot” (Turley)

Democrats appear to be adopting an “impeach-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out” approach to the upcoming session of Congress.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested this week that Democrats may want to impeach United States Supreme Court justices because “you know, they kind of legalized a lot of his criminality.” The democratic socialist has been promising “many, many, many” investigations into what she now calls the “criminals” in the Administration. In an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju, she added the justices to the list of potential targets:
“There are so many criminals in this administration, it’s hard to figure out who should be, you know, the order of operations. There are going to be many, many, many investigations. I imagine many subpoenas, and we have to follow wherever the evidence takes us…I mean, I think we should leave all options on the table. Absolutely. I mean, of course this Supreme Court as well has also kind of legalized a lot of his criminality, and they’re pointing at impeachment. Impeachment in this Republican majority at that time was pointing at the Supreme Court/ We’ll see. We’ll approach it, but I think all options are on the table.” (emphasis added)
This is not the first such call by Ocasio-Cortez. She previously announced that she wants the impeachment of all six of the conservative justices. Other Democratic members immediately joined her call for Supreme Court impeachments. Ocasio-Cortez also admitted that she does not understand why we even have a Supreme Court. She asked, “How much does the current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does.”
Democratic members have been calling for impeaching conservative justices for years on specious grounds. Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Gorsuch have all been named in past impeachment demands. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, however, is suggesting a type of collective guilt for “high crimes and misdemeanors…and legalizing a lot.”
So, as Democratic leaders call to pack the Court with an instant liberal majority, others would like to remove conservatives through impeachment. These voices show the impact of the rage politics that used to secure power in Congress. Since Democrats do not have enough votes to overcome a veto, they are looking at gridlock on legislation. What they can offer is rage in the form of investigations and impeachments.
In the meantime, the Democratic Party is sounding like a party of berserkers. There is little recognition of the dangerous, destabilizing impact of such actions on our constitutional system.

Will the Supreme Court survive intact?

• Alito Warns Congress Can ‘Turn Off the Lights’ at Supreme Court (Fred Lucas)

Justice Samuel Alito warned Congress “can turn off the lights at the Supreme Court” through its control of the purse strings. Alito spoke to Federalist Society members on Thursday, just more than a week after Democrats gained majorities in Congress and some members have issued subpoena threats to justices.

“Congress can turn off the lights at the Supreme Court and stop everything from happening if they want to defund their activities. And there are many, many, many other things that they can do, or at least try to do,” Alito said Thursday in widely reported remarks at the Federalist Society’s Antonin Scalia Memorial Dinner, named for the late conservative justice. “So, it is important to preserve the independence of the judiciary,” the justice said to a crowd of more than 1,000, according to The Hill.
“If that is eliminated, then the Constitution as adopted in 1789 will no longer be the same.” The expected chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., were coordinating an effort to investigate and subpoena Supreme Court justices in the next term, Whitehouse said in August. Many Democrat members of Congress and candidates have floated “court packing” proposals to expand the number of justices to 13 and threatened to impose term limits.
Other Democrat lawmakers suggested withholding funding to pressure the high court to adopt ethics reforms. Several Democrat candidates were elected with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America; the party’s platform calls for amending the Constitution to make the executive branch and judiciary appointed by and subordinate to Congress rather than existing as co-equal branches.
Alito on Thursday also criticized lower court judges for what he called “unjustified” rulings that blocked presidential policies in recent years. Several district courts imposed nationwide injunctions on executive policies.
“They are dedicated and they are skillful, but they’re not perfect and they make mistakes,” Alito said. “And in some instances, I think they have gone far astray in abuse of their powers.” Alito, appointed by President George W. Bush, is perhaps most known for writing the high court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade.
He also said the judiciary is the least powerful branch and is “vulnerable” to Congress and the executive. A president nominates judges, the Senate confirms them, and Congress controls the court’s budget.

The whole country was founded upon the Bible. It no longer has any value.

• Muslim Sen.-Elect El-Sayed to Take Oath on a Quran (Al Perrotta)

The first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate says he will take his oath of office in January on a Quran.

“Which Quran, we’re not sure,” Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed, D-Mich., told NPR’s Leila Fadel Thursday. “I mean, Thomas Jefferson had a copy of the Quran. So when Keith Ellison was sworn in to Congress, he swore in on that copy. There’s also the University of Michigan holds the first Quran in the state of Michigan. It’s very, very old, and that might be the choice.” “So, I don’t know,” he said. “But I will swear on the Quran.”
El-Sayed says it’s less important to him to be sworn in as the first Muslim senator than it is for America. “I mean, everybody has the experience of being told they’re less than or excluded or that they don’t belong,” said El-Sayed. “I hope that when people see that, there is this sense that America really is big enough for you, right? It really doesn’t matter what your name is, doesn’t matter how you pray. Like, America is big enough.”
There are fewer than 4.5 million Muslims in the United States, according to World Population Review. Muslim Population by State 2026. On Wednesday, El-Sayed joined other members of the incoming freshman class of U.S. senators for their first tour of the U.S. Capitol and initial orientation sessions. However, the Michigan Democrat is raising concerns over his alleged embrace of radical Islamist ideology and antisemitism.
During his campaign, El-Sayed was sharply criticized for downplaying the terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue, saying that “hurt people hurt people.” He later told members of the state Democratic Party’s Jewish Caucus, “I made a mistake,” referring to his initial comments, adding, “If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry. It was not what I intended to do,” JTA reported.
El-Sayed also refused to condemn the Islamist terror group Hamas; refused to speak in support of the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; refused to clearly state Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; campaigned with notorious antisemite Hasan Piker; and refused to condemn a campaign ad in his support that was widely acknowledged to be antisemitic.
He also denied reports, including quotes from his own sister, that indicated his family’s deep ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Daily Signal reported in October that Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., said such ties, if proven, would be disqualifying. “Any congressional candidate with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood should be immediately disqualified,” Miller told the Daily Signal. “Public office is a public trust, and it must never be entrusted to those who hate everything our country stands for.”
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said this week that, given El-Sayed’s connections and statements, he should undergo a formal background check before being given classified information as a U.S. senator. “We’re about to watch somebody who has questionable contacts and views and then hand them access to our most precious secrets.”
Spicer has started a petition that has garnered more than 6,000 signatures thus far. He also says El-Sayed shouldn’t be the only member of Congress subject to a background check. “Why can’t we make all of them do it?” El-Sayed, and colleagues, will be sworn in at noon Jan. 3, 2027.

“Are We Repeating the Horrors of Kristallnacht?”

You can’t have muslim senators and at the same time protect your Jewish population.

• The Alarming Rise of Open Antisemitism (Victor Davis Hanson)

Monday and Tuesday marked the 88th anniversary of something called Kristallnacht that occurred in November of 1938 in Nazi Germany.

What was it? It translates as Crystal Night, or the Night of the Broken Glass. And what it was was a pre-planned massive demonstration against Jewish shop owners in Vienna, Austria, that had been part now of the Third Reich due to the Anschluss, as well as Berlin and the major cities, but mostly in Berlin and Vienna.
And what happened? A 17-year-old Polish Jewish teenager had killed a German ambassador in France. That was what they were waiting for, any excuse. And out poured the SS and the SA and all of the shock troops of the Third Reich. Up to that point, Hitler had been very, very careful not to scare away Western support—he had had the Olympics in ’36—about what his ultimate plans for Jews were. But he felt at this point, 1938, given his successes, diplomatic, that it was time to be overt.
And what was that? What happened? People poured out in the streets from the Nazi Party, and they terrorized synagogues and shops. They deliberately identified Jews. They killed hundreds of Jews. They injured them. They put thousands in camps. And they destroyed their businesses. When the owners who had survived and filed claims, they even stole their insurance money.
So, from that point on, there was no going back. That was a straight linear road to Auschwitz and Treblinka years later.
OK, so that was an odious moment in Western civilization. And what are we doing as I speak? Today, there is a Philadelphia bike ride that’s organized by a lot of leftist groups and mostly, to be honest, socialist Islamicist groups. And they want to ride their bikes through the streets of downtown Philadelphia, and they want to identify Jewish stores and mostly restaurants. And then they’re going to demonstrate, harass, point them out, and who knows what level of violence will occur unless there’s sufficient law enforcement.
They have no idea whether the owners of these restaurants are pro or against Israel. It has nothing to do with—it has everything to do with they’re Jewish. Now, why are they doing this? They’re doing this because we have lowered the bar on what is acceptable.
Take Mr. Abdul El-Sayed. He’s the new senator-elect from Michigan. [The uncle of] Hasan Piker, [who he campaigned with], ran an ad, and it said in the ad that Jews were responsible, i.e., Zionists and Israel were responsible for the price hikes on bananas and food products, eggs, and things.
Think about that. Because of aid to Israel, about three and a half billion. Three and a half billion to Israel, which will cease entirely at the end of the year, is one percent of the foreign aid budget. It is one-twentieth of one percent of the federal budget. That is a complete lie, complete lie, that that minuscule amount has anything to do with inflation. And they know it.
Hasan Piker recently said he’s the new guru, the fixer, the new James Carville of the Democratic Party. What did he say? He said if Jews want to support Israel as a group—and there’s no evidence that they do, because I think you could argue that the majority of Jews in the last midterm election, even after these antisemitic incidents, voted for candidates that could not be pro-Israel. They wouldn’t—if they were pro-Israel in this election, they were done for most part. But nevertheless, he said if Jews support Israel, they’re gonna be targeted, and this is what happens.
So, if you elect a senator who has an ad and he won’t disavow it, and it’s clearly antisemitic, and you have the guru of the party, the young party, the socialist Islamic’s base, say that Jews were gonna be targeted, what do you expect will happen? And now we’re out in the open.
Let me just finish by reminding people that the reason that we support Israel, it’s the only consensual society. It’s the only democracy in the entire 500-million-person Middle East. Let me ask all of you who are saying, “Free Palestine, free Gaza.” It’s mostly about Gaza.
Gaza, after 2005, had no Israelis. They wouldn’t allow Jews to live there. There are 2 million Arab citizens inside Israel. If Jews wanted to become citizens of Gaza, they couldn’t do it. It was an apartheid state. It was an Arab-only state. Israel had no presence in Gaza. It was supplying its power, much of its fuel, much of its water, much of its trade.
If you go to Gaza and looked at the so-called fence that was breached on Oct. 7, it’s not as impressive as the Egyptian fence. In other words, if Gaza was being oppressed by Jews, why did Egypt have a greater barrier between Gaza and Egypt than Israel did between Gaza and—why were there 20,000 people coming across and making three times the wage that they could in Gaza until Oct. 7?
Another thing, just as a thought experiment. Let’s say any of the people who are on the bikes this weekend, pointing out Jewish stores and saying, “Free Palestine,” I challenge you to do two things.
One, go to any Arab country and stand on the street and say, “I am a Muslim and I renounce Islam, and I am a citizen of Kuwait, of Egypt, of Syria, of Saudi Arabia, and I detest the government, and I say they’re corrupt.” And see what happens to you. One of three things will happen immediately. Either a mob will kill you, or you will be put in jail, or, worse, you will be exiled.
Try the same thing in Israel. Go to Israel and say, “I hate the Netanyahu government, and I’m a Jew who am ashamed, and I’m going to be an apostate and become a Muslim.” What’s gonna happen to you? Nothing. Nothing. It’s a free society.
I’ll finish with this. There’s a hit show called “Fauda.” It’s about the Israeli intelligence services battling radical Palestinians. And the reason that it’s either the first or second rated show in places like Egypt and the Gulf States and Jordan, throughout the 500-million-person Middle East, is that it doesn’t show Palestinian terrorists and the people who support them as completely evil, and it doesn’t show the Israelis as saints or perfect people.
In other words, it tries to explore why the Palestinians are killing innocent Israelis and why the Israelis react in the way they do. Don’t listen to me. Listen to the 500-million-person Middle East that likes what they see, and they’re fascinated by it. Why? Because they could not film that anywhere in an Arab country.
If you said to the Arab world, “Make a picture about the Israeli-Palestinian fight,” what would they do? It would be completely censored, and it would be one view only, and it would resemble what Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza learn every day in their schools. But the reason that “Fauda” is very popular is it’s a product of a free, self-critical society.
And the idea now that we hate Jews, and we hate a democratic Israel, and we have not just a desire to go out and target stores in Philadelphia, we have a desire to do it on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, one of the most reprehensible and shameful episodes in the West. And so warped have we become that we take a moral travesty of the past and we celebrate it by repeating it, if we could, in the present.

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In her first appearance as a Fox News contributor, she said the fake news has Miller COMPLETELY WRONG.

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November 14, 2026 at 10:10 am #255723

Raúl Ilargi Meijer
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Vincent van Gogh Boulevard de Clichy, Paris 1887 • An Unfiltered Conversation With President Trump (CTH) • White House Warns Democrats Over Trump Prob
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle November 14 2026]
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