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Forgotten Subplots

Though the writers will likely bring it back soon.

Denmark’s military spending spree was announced in January this year, shortly after US President Donald Trump began expressing renewed interest in controlling Greenland, insisting last December ahead of taking office that “the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

Subsequent remarks, in which Trump refused to rule out taking Greenland by force, stirred further alarm.

But while the issue appears to have dropped off the agenda of the mercurial US leader, along with his threats to annex Canada and to take over the Panama Canal, many Danes still see it as their most pressing – and worrying – diplomatic challenge.

Pariah Nation

It most likely won't happen quickly, but if there are any big outbreaks, get ready to have your vaccine records ready if you want to travel anywhere outside the country.

In a much anticipated public appearance, Susan Monarez, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, defended her short tenure at the embattled public health agency. She testified that she was ousted last month because she refused to follow Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s demands to pre-approve vaccine recommendations for the public and fire career scientists.

No worries, politics is all just debate club for disgusting debate club perverts. Nothing really matters!

Seems Bad

The important thing to remember is we treat "everybody" like this, but some of these Koreans might be people who matter.

We got a vivid glimpse of what it looks like for harsh immigration policies to undermine growth and investment earlier this month, in Georgia, when immigration officials detained hundreds of South Korean nationals working at a battery plant in a small town outside Savannah. On Sept. 4, a large detachment of federal, state and local law enforcement descended on an electric vehicle battery plant operated by Hyundai and LG Electronics. The raid, which the administration described as one of the largest-ever single-location enforcement operations conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, was aimed at just four people. Officials detained nearly 500, the large majority of whom were South Korean workers brought to the plant to assist with its construction.

While it appears that some of the workers had entered the United States illegally or were present on expired visas, lawyers for others say that their clients had the legal right to work in the United States. The workers, who were held for more than a week, described terrible conditions.

“Their waists and hands were tied together, forcing them to bend down and lick water to drink,” The Hankyoreh, a daily newspaper in South Korea reported. “The unscreened bathrooms contained only a single sheet to cover their lower bodies. Sunlight barely penetrated through a fist-sized hole, and they were only allowed access to the small yard for two hours.”

All lawlessness and lies.

On August 31, 2025, U.S. Magistrate Judge Christopher Ray issued a warrant to allow ICE to search the Georgia battery plant, a joint venture of Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, naming four Mexican nationals as “targeted persons.” (The Savannah Morning News obtained a copy of the search warrant.) Nothing in the warrant indicated ICE intended to arrest South Korean workers helping to set up a battery plant for electric vehicles slated to employ 2,000 U.S. workers.

On September 4, 2025, approximately 400 state and federal law enforcement personnel raided the battery plant. While they came upon 175 to 200 Latino workers, not all of them working unlawfully, ICE agents also encountered hundreds of South Korean workers.

Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney at Kuck Baxter in Atlanta, represents 11 individuals arrested in the raid and pieced together what happened at the facility. ICE did not bring Korean language interpreters—proof Koreans were not the intended target—but managed to determine that the South Koreans at the facility entered on B-1 visas or the Electronic System for Travel Authorization known as ESTA.

“Not thinking that B-1 and ESTA allow ‘after-sales service and installation,’ which is what the Koreans were doing in setting up the equipment to make the batteries at the facility, ICE agents decided on the spot to arrest all the South Korean workers,” said Kuck in an interview. One of Kuck’s South Korean clients had just arrived the night before and was sitting in a conference room in a business suit, attending a meeting, when arrested by ICE.

An important thing here - which "everyone" seems to be forgetting - is that even if people have real immigration violations, you don't have treat them like this, or anything close to like this. Just tell them to stop working and go home.

A New Group Forms To Oppose Groups

Dems need to stop talking about the disgusting queers and talk about normal people. All they do is talk about those deviant perverts! But Adam Jentleson is going to fix that and get rich in the process.

Rich people do love the worst grifters in Dem politics, as long as they are sufficiently bigoted.

Nothing voters want more than loudly advertising you don't know what the fuck you want to do:

What does your think tank support?  Bigotry, pushing people who are mean to us on social media out of public life, and, I dunno, some stuff we will figure out on a game show.  Voters like game show hosts, right? We'll get our own!

The "funny" thing is that there are a bunch of initiatives like this, and they're all trying to one up each other by going further right.  

Have fun, kids.

They Know Even Less Than What They Say

Coates:

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

What can we make of most of our pundits?

Happy Hour

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Nobody Could Have Predicted

I know nothing about global soybean markets, but if you had asked me if China "needed" US soybeans, I would've guessed "no."

The U.S. normally ships most of its soybeans to China between September and January, before Brazil's harvest hits the market, but Chinese buyers have yet to book any U.S. cargoes for the new crop year, according to traders tracking shipments.

Zero.

The Pundit Credo

go ahead. keep screaming "Shut The Fuck Up " at me. it only makes my opinions Worse

— wint (@dril) March 10, 2018

Voice Of Reason, Michael Savage

Funny times.

After All They Did For Him

You do have to laugh:

President Donald Trump reportedly skipped a prayer vigil for slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk Sunday at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The president’s public events schedule was blank for Sunday, The Daily Beast reported, and his press schedule indicated he was spending the weekend at his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.

NYT, earlier:

Sure Why Not

One could spend all day with Ben Shapiro clips - I believe quoting him accurately is still legal since he is not dead - but the first notable one I noticed is him objecting to a gay couple being featured on a home improvement show.

Charlie Kirk weighs in at the link, too.  Hope I don't get arrested!

This was recorded before Charlie Kirk's murder, which doesn't make it better.

Plot Twist

BREAKING: Justice Gregory Carro has dismissed the first degree murder charge against Luigi Mangione in his state case, finding the DA put legally insufficient evidence before the grand jury. More TK.

— Molly Crane-Newman (@mollycranenewman.bsky.social) September 16, 2025 at 2:38 PM

...still faces second degree, to be clear. All terrorism charges dropped.

...Ah I see New York's first degree murder charge does require an extreme "enhancement," like terrorism, so this isn't so weird.

Solidarity

In very general terms, our elite institutions have shown very little solidarity for the lesser people, or in the case of journalism, lesser publications, and in fact have been gleefully stomping on them much of the time, so I have to laugh at this.

President Donald Trump announced Monday he will file a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, alleging defamation and libel, and accusing the outlet of being a “virtual mouthpiece” for the Democrat party.

Is it bad? Yes. Is it very funny? Also yes.

Few elite journalists saw what Mo Ryan did when Thiel destroyed Gawker.

This is about one of the fundamental pillars of democracy being threatened by entities with almost infinite power and resources. You know those superhero films in which unstoppable, power-mad villains in the midst of meltdowns decide to threaten entire planets? Yeah, that scenario doesn’t feel all that far-fetched, especially if you’ve spent a decade or two or three working in the media industry.

There have always been rich people who’ve gone after the media, sometimes for frivolous reasons, sometimes for good ones. But the fact is, there are more billionaires in this country than ever. If they all decide to go scorched-earth on journalism outlets they don’t like, well, say goodbye to a free press.

A thriving media ecosystem in which journalists and critics can speak truth to power on a regular basis is one of the foundations of a civil society. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, as long as the press doesn’t make rich and powerful people angry.” Wait, I may have that excerpt from the Constitution wrong. Or do I?

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, I’m not. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos now owns the Washington Post. Magnate Sheldon Adelson is the owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which he appears to be gutting like a fish. And as many commentators have pointed out, Thiel has the ear of the most powerful man at any media company on Earth: Mark Zuckerberg.

Thiel is friends with Zuckerberg and is on the board of Facebook, which, in case you weren’t aware, holds the fate of many media firms in its clammy, data-driven hands. You haven’t seen frenzy behind the scenes at a media company until you’ve lived through a week in which Facebook changes its cryptic algorithms. Few things cause more newsroom ulcers than Facebook or Google altering the the ways in which their users engage with news content. Forget Oprah and Time, Inc: A small array of tech firms hold the keys to the media kingdom, they move in mysterious ways and they answer to no one.

And many of these tech firms believe it’s their mission to fundamentally change our society, which isn’t necessarily a bad impulse, but they’re coming from a culture in which secrecy is an ingrained survival instinct. They don’t like scrutiny and they think pulling back the curtain means giving away trade secrets. In short, many of these companies and the titans they’ve spawned want to build the future without being transparent about their motives, methods or endgames.

And the press? That’s merely something to be controlled. Not so much a pillar but a pet.

That was 9 years ago.

Morning

Gonna have a sip of coffee and see what our great free speech defenders are up to.

Monday Evening

enjoy

America's Worst Newspaper

The Washington Post.

I don't think this was true even 5 years ago, but now we have reached the point where the influence of legacy media outlets is almost entirely through their influence of, and amplification by, other powerful people.  The problem with Morning Joseph is that members of Congress watch him. Almost nobody else does.

The problem with CNN and MSNBC is that they are on in congressional offices all day.  Nobody else watches them.

During total day, MSNBC averaged 466,000 total viewers and 37,000 demo [25-54] viewers. This represented a -6% loss in total viewers and a -21% fall in the demo compared to the network’s average the week prior.

...

In total day, the network [CNN] had 366,000 total viewers and 54,000 viewers in the demo [25-54]. This resulted in a 17% increase in total viewers and an 8% increase in the demo during this daypart.

The only reason to care about what's in the WaPo opinion page is that Chuck Schumer probably does.

Sure Why Not

* TRUMP: COMPANIES AND CORPORATIONS SHOULD NO LONGER BE FORCED TO "REPORT" ON A QUARTERLY BASIS @reuters.com #StopTheCount

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) September 15, 2025 at 1:01 PM

I have no idea if this makes sense. It might!

America's Worst Journalists

 Bob Woodward.

I Found The Note

Kash Patel says Charlie Kirk shooting suspect had written a note about the attack that has since been destroyed, but the FBI has “confirmed” what the note said “because of our aggressive interview posture” pic.twitter.com/bq8DppBuTc

— Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) September 15, 2025

It wasn't destroyed, it was just mailed to me somehow.