While President Donald J. Trump was gloating over the horrific murders of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, the U.S. military yesterday struck three small boats in the eastern Pacific, killing eight people. U.S. Southern Command announced the strikes on social media, saying they were conducted “at the direction of [Secretary of] War Pete Hegseth.” It claimed that intelligence had confirmed that the vessels were “engaged in narco-trafficking.” This brings the number of people killed in the U.S. strikes to at least 95. As Piper Hudspeth Blackburn of CNN reports, the administration maintains the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” against drug cartels. But legal experts dismiss this claim and say the U.S. has no legal basis for the deadly attacks on the small boats. Notably, as Bill Kristol of The Bulwark pointed out on December 11, the government has gotten legal justification for its actions when it can: before the U.S. seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela last week, the government apparently secured a warrant for the seizure from a federal judge because the Treasury Department had sanctioned the ship in 2022 for illegal activities related to smuggling Iranian oil. In the case of the strikes on the small boats, though, the administration has not provided evidence of its claims either to the public or to Congress, whose permission to continue the strikes is required by the 1973 War Powers Act if indeed the country is engaged in an armed conflict. Today, Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed the House and the Senate on the strikes but continued to refuse to show the lawmakers an unedited version of the video of a strike of September 2 that killed two survivors of a previous strike, an event that legal analysts suggest is a war crime or murder. After he left the briefing, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said “that the administration had no legal justification for these strikes and had no national security justification for these strikes.” He noted that the officers admitted that the drugs going through Venezuela were not fentanyl, as the administration has suggested, but rather primarily cocaine headed for Europe. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) called the briefing “a joke.… There was not a single piece of intelligence that was shared that even rises to the level of any other briefing that we’ve seen on Ukraine, China, anything…. This was not a serious intelligence briefing; this was a communication of an opinion.” Hegseth later told reporters that members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees will be able to see the unedited video tomorrow, adding: “Of course, we’re not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public.” Ashley Murray of News from the States quoted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who said after the meeting: “The administration came to this briefing empty handed. If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean? Every senator is entitled to see it.” Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said: “It is hard to square the widespread, routine, prompt posting of detailed videos of every strike, with a concern that posting a portion of the video of the first strike would violate a variety of classification concerns.” The Department of Justice today argued in court that Trump’s ballroom project must go forward for reasons of national security despite the lawsuit filed on Friday. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop the project from going forward without legally required reviews and public input. Secret Service deputy director Matthew Quinn told the court that when Trump tore down the East Wing in October, he destroyed the security infrastructure under the building. Now, he said, “any pause in construction, even temporarily, would…hamper the Secret Service’s ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission.” But while Trump focuses on his architectural projects, the administration seems unable to meet other obligations. Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel is facing criticism for announcing on social media that the FBI had detained a person of interest in Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, that killed two and injured nine others. That individual was released hours later. This is not the first time Patel has rushed to make an announcement that later turned out to be incorrect. When asked why the FBI is having trouble locating the suspect, Trump tried to blame the university. “You’d really have to ask the school a little bit more about that because this was a school problem,” he said. “They had their own guards. They had their own police. They had their own everything, but you’d have to ask that question really to the school, not to the FBI. We came in after the fact, and the FBI will do a good job, but they came in after the fact.” An interview with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles published in Vanity Fair today reinforces the impression that the administration is chaotic. In eleven interviews with Wiles over the course of Trump’s second term so far, journalist Chris Whipple examined the administration’s handling of major issues: the destruction of USAID, deportations of immigrants, Trump’s tariff war, the deployment of National Guard troops in Democratic-dominated cities, Trump’s “revenge” against those he perceives as enemies, the destruction of Gaza, and the administration’s attack on small boats from Venezuela. Wiles told Whipple that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” suggesting he cannot imagine limits on his behavior, and quoted him as judging people “by their genes”; that Vice President J.D. Vance converted from being a Never Trumper to a major MAGA booster for political reasons; that director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, is “a right-wing absolute zealot”; that Musk’s reposting of a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao was a reflection of his drug use; and that Trump is, indeed, embarked on a project to use the power of the government to hurt people he hates. After the article appeared, Wiles issued a statement that did not say Whipple had misquoted her, but called the article “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.” She continued: “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.” Apparently to demonstrate unanimity, the White House got senior officials to put out on social media statements supporting Wiles. One of the things Wiles discussed with Whipple was the administration’s strikes against the small boats from Venezuela. Wiles suggested that, for all his talk about drug dealers, Trump is primarily interested in regime change. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles told Whipple. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” This afternoon, Trump announced he would address the nation tomorrow night. Then, at 6:46 this evening, he posted on social media: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) noted that the “threatened military action directly contradicts what Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth told my Senate colleagues and I today about the mission and goals of their operations in the Caribbean. This is a dangerous escalation, and this administration must come before Congress for public hearings and explain to the American people why they are risking pulling us into another forever war.” |
HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Wednesday, December 17, 2025
HEATHER 12-16
Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief
Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief
Dec.
16, 2025
Credit...Louise Delmotte/Associated Press
Opinion
Columnist
Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to
devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say
about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? —
sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human
being ever to occupy the White House.
Markets will not be moved, or brigades redeployed, or
history shifted, because Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found
stabbed to death on Sunday in their home in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son Nick.
But this is an appalling human tragedy and a terrible
national loss. Reiner’s movies, including “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride”
and “When Harry Met Sally…,” are landmarks in the inner lives of millions of
people; I can still quote by heart dialogue and song lyrics from his 1984
classic, “This Is Spinal Tap.” Until last week, he and Michele
remained creative forces as well as one of Hollywood’s great real-life love
stories. Their liberal politics, though mostly not my own, were honorable and
sincere.
To which our ogre in chief had this to say on social media:
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob
Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and
comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due
to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable
affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,
sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his
raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia
reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and
expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps
like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
I quote Trump’s post in full not only because it must
be read to be believed, but also because it captures the combination of
preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite that
“deranged” the Reiners and so many other Americans trying to hold on to a sense
of national decency. Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of
others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social
nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to
prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds.
That is where history will record that the deepest
damage by the Trump presidency was done. There is, as Adam Smith said, “a great
deal of ruin in a nation,” by which he meant that there are things in almost
any country that are going badly wrong but can still be mended. Foolishly
imposed tariffs can be repealed. Hastily cut funding can be restored.
Ill-thought-out national security strategies can be rewritten. Shaken trust can
be rebuilt between Washington and our allies.
But the damage that cuts deepest is never financial,
legal or institutional. As one of Smith’s greatest contemporaries, Edmund
Burke, knew, it lies in something softer and less tangible but also more
important: manners. “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt
or debase, barbarize or refine us,” Burke wrote. It is, he warned, through
manners that laws are either made or unmade, upheld or corrupted.
Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in
every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every
executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese
emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought
the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in
every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is
striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires
paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every
visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious
tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation
are being debased, our manners barbarized.
I wonder if we are ever getting them back — and if so,
what will it take. As Trump was unloading on Reiner, James Woods, probably the
most outspoken Trump supporter in Hollywood, lovingly remembered Reiner as a “godsend in my
life” who saved his acting career when it was at a low point 30 years ago.
“I think Rob Reiner is a great patriot,” Woods said
Monday on Fox News. “Do I agree with some of, or many of, his ideas on how that
patriotism should be enacted, to celebrate the America that we both love? No.
But he doesn’t agree with me either, but he also respects my patriotism.” Woods
is right, but how that spirit of mutual respect and good faith can be revived
under a man like Trump is a question he and the rest of the president’s
supporters might helpfully ask of themselves.
The Reiner murders took place on the same weekend that
an assailant, still at large, murdered two students at Brown University, and
when an antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, gave every
Jew in America a pit-of-our-stomachs sense that something like it may soon
happen here again, as it did in Pittsburgh seven years ago. It’s been only
three months since Charlie Kirk was shot in cold blood in Utah, and barely a
year since the health care executive Brian Thompson was murdered in Manhattan
by an alleged assailant who is now a folk hero to the deranged reaches of the
left.
This is not a country on the cusp of its “Golden Age,”
to quote the president, except in the sense that gold futures are near a record
high as a hedge against inflation. It’s a country that feels like a train
coming off the rails, led by a driver whose own derangement was again laid bare
in that contemptible assault on the Reiners, may their memories be for a
blessing.
Happy Hanukkah, I guess.
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
SUSIE WILES SPILLS THE BEANS TO TRY TO SAVE HER REP AND HER BUTT
BREAKING: Vanity Fair author Chris Whipple just revealed stunning details from his conversations with Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff.
NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN
Beware These Retention and
Recruitment Mistakes That Will Hurt Employee Engagement
Investing
in your people is the highest and best use of any entrepreneur’s time and
energy.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Dec 16, 2025
The vast majority of the
heated headcount conversations taking place in businesses across the country
are primarily focused on workforce reductions, with companies thinking purely
short term and trying to “save their way to success.” Sadly, this is both a
pipedream and a fool’s errand. It’s still the rule that you’ve got to
spend money to make money. Simply cutting back broadly and indiscriminately on
your people across the board in a frantic panic designed to please your
directors and bankers isn’t the way to build your business for the future.
You’ve spent time and
plenty of dollars finding and training these folks, and their experience and
specific product and service know-how isn’t going to be that easy to replace
when things get better. The general stupidity of the DOGE people in their wholesale
dismissals and especially the work of the wrestling moron running the
Department of Education (who is now begging dozens of key employees who were
abruptly dumped to return to their jobs) is a great example of exactly what not
to do.
The next most frequent
discussions relate to the need for rapid recruitment of new employees with an
over-emphasis on AI-first prospects. Of course, virtually every profile
on LinkedIn has already been modified to describe AI chops and vast abilities
in that area. And while it’s undoubtedly true in theory that it’s easier today
to teach an AI jock about marketing than
it is to teach an experienced marketer all about AI, mastery of the new tools
and techniques is only an important part of the new job requirements and not
the be-all and end-all of the story. It’s a lot more efficient and actually
less costly to pair some of your key experienced people with some really
smart young people with the right attitudes who can use
the new methods to amplify and extend the business’s experience base and
increase productivity without the pains and delays of
trying to learn the ins-and-outs of a whole new industry on the fly. Leave the
rocket science to the rookies, but don’t bet the whole business on a bunch of
whiz kids. As my mother used to say: “Hire a young carpenter, but an old
physician.”
So, companies should
feel free to recruit away, but not at the risk of angering, frustrating or
demotivating their current team members. They need a story and a vision that
works just as well inside as outside the company. But this juggling act is a
lot easier said than done, which is why far too many companies end up
overlooking and failing to incorporate it into their overall HR strategies.
This puts a substantial premium on retaining their key employees, regardless of
tenure, instead of basically taking them for granted and ignoring their own
needs and desires.
It’s too late to fix an
unhappy situation or retain a key member of the team once they’re already out
the door. The best time to keep an employee is before he or she
leaves. And the scariest and most unfortunate part of the problem is that the best
people aren’t interested in conflicts or complaints. They just make up their
minds one day and leave. This is why you can never afford to leave well enough
alone. It pays long-term benefits to pay attention all the time.
The risks in our
businesses that leave us most vulnerable are the ones we fail to foresee. But
today there are cost-effective and relatively easy ways to build yourself and
your HR team your very own “crystal ball” to give you a realistic and practical
view of the future. I have to admit that when I first looked into this area, I
was very skeptical that the data (captured anonymously) and the underlying
algorithms could be sufficiently predictive and instructive to be of real
value. However, we have watched for more than a decade the growth and success
of Balloon,
which has built a powerful employee survey and suggestion system based on
anonymous inputs which clearly adds immediate value to its users.
One leading company in
this new space is Holistic, which provides a comprehensive program
called SafeAhead. As you might expect, this system will help you move your
team from a painful past of simply reacting to the bad news of unexpected
employee departures to a process of proactive actions based on predictive data
(customized to your company) which will let you anticipate, intercept and
proactively interrupt employee departure plans effectively before the targeted
employees even begin planning to leave.
Holistic provides a company-wide analysis and set of reports that specifically
identify the levels of departure risk associated with each and every team
member based on where they are located in the company (departmentally and
geographically), their tenure, their levels of management responsibility, their
compensation, and various external considerations which are also relevant to
their overall attitudes such as changes in their management, missed advancement
opportunities, and relocation challenges. As an example, we know that people
may hire on because of a company’s reputation or vision, but they regularly
leave because of management—especially very early in their employment.
Holistic’s broader
reports roll up to provide small actionable target groups of high-risk
employees along with specifics regarding each person’s issues and concerns as
well as suggestions for management as to how these problems can be addressed
and remedied in real time in order to prevent costly and disruptive departures.
Visual aids and matrices let senior management see at a glance where in the
business the greatest problem areas are located and just how many employees in
each given department or division are at various degrees of departure risk.
Responding and reacting
to these reports which are predicated on numerous variables like degrees
of employee engagement,
changes in performance levels, and other supervisory and management issues lets
senior management get ahead of the game and stay ahead of inchoate problems by
taking affirmative and specifically responsive actions in each case.
I call this approach
“preemptive empathy” and every business can use far more of it. Caring for and
investing in your people is the highest and best use of any entrepreneur’s time
and energy. The real trick is to train your employees well enough so that they
could leave; but treat them well enough so they don’t want to.
Monday, December 15, 2025
COULD THERE BE A SICKER, MORE DISGUSTING AND DERANGED CRIMINAL THAN THIS PIG?
Trump attack on Rob
Reiner tests the limits, even for his MAGA base
The
president accused Reiner, who was stabbed to death along with his wife, of
having “Trump derangement syndrome”
Updated
December 15, 2025 at
6:30 p.m. EST34 minutes ago
In the decade since he announced his presidential campaign
by branding immigrants as criminals and rapists, the accepted wisdom about
Donald Trump has become this: No matter how outrageous are the things he says,
he feels no consequences.
With each offensive blast, Republican elected officials are
rendered mute, or tell inquiring journalists they haven’t seen the latest and
quickly excuse themselves. MAGA influencers applaud and celebrate the ire Trump
generates from the left as “owning the liberals.”
So what happened Monday was noteworthy — maybe a sign that
there really is a limit to how low Trump can take the public discourse, maybe
evidence that his powers are waning or maybe nothing more than an anomalous
disturbance in the force.
There was actual blowback from some on the right over the
president’s reaction to the stabbing deaths of Hollywood director Rob Reiner
and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, allegedly at the hands of their 32-year-old son who
had struggled for years with addiction and mental illness. As Trump is wont to
do, he made it all about himself.
The president described the tragedy this way on the Truth Social media platform that
has become an outlet for his id: “Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but
once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together
with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through
his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease
known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.”
Reiner, Trump wrote, “was known to have driven people CRAZY
by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia
reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and
expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps
like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
This was too much for a handful of conservative influencers
who have large followings of their own.
“What happened last night to Rob Reiner and his wife was a
savage butchering of 2 human lives. I don’t care what their politics were or
how they felt about Trump, no law abiding human deserves this. We should pray
for + send condolences to his loved ones and NOT make it political,” filmmaker
Robby Starbuck wrote on X.
British broadcaster Piers Morgan, a longtime friend of
Trump, wrote: “This is a dreadful thing to say about a man who just got
murdered by his troubled son. Delete it, Mr President.”
And even a few Republicans in Congress — albeit those such
as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) and Thomas Massie (Kentucky) who have
already had their differences with Trump — spoke out. Massie wrote: “Regardless
of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful
discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered. I guess my elected GOP
colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re
afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.”
Reiner, who directed what are regarded as a host of modern Hollywood’s finest
films, was a major force in Democratic politics and a frequent
critic of the president. His shocking and violent death drew immediate
comparisons with the assassination in September of conservative influencer
Charlie Kirk.
Andrew Kolvet, spokesman for Kirk’s organization Turning
Point USA, posted a video on X in which Reiner described his reaction to Kirk’s
death as “horror — absolute horror.” Kolvet wrote: “Rob Reiner responded with
grace and compassion to Charlie’s assassination. This video makes it all the
more painful to hear of he and his wife’s tragic end. May God be close to the
broken hearted in this terrible story.”
But that “grace and compassion” was not universal in the
country’s overheated political environment. After Kirk’s death, some of his
critics faced blistering criticism for making harsh comments about him.
As news of Reiner’s death spread, “liberals are desperately
searching for a prominent conservative mocking Rob Reiner and his wife
passing,” a MAGA commentator who posts as Gunther Eagleman wrote on X, a
platform where he has 1.6 million followers. Trump’s blast came nine hours
later.
“A man and his wife were murdered last night. This is NOT
the appropriate response,” wrote Jenna Ellis, a former attorney pardoned by
Trump for her involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “The Right
uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s
death. This is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the
two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any
decency.”
Others on the right, however, quickly fell in line behind
Trump. After predicting “You won’t see people on the right celebrating the
horrific murder of Rob Reiner and his wife,” Jack Posobiec (3.2 million
followers) wrote on X: “Where is the celebration in Trump’s post? He isn’t
celebrating, he is warning.”
And GOP congressional leaders, were true to form. Senate
Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) declined to comment on Trump’s
outburst, saying only: “It’s a tragedy, and my sympathies and prayers go out
the Reiner family and to their friends.”
In the holiday season, “we have to appeal to our better
angels, and I think we’ve got to amplify those voices and those sentiments,”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told reporters on Monday. Then he
hastened down a private hallway to his office.