Tag: donald trump

Trump admin firing squad will be first military execution in 65 years

The planned December execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted in 2013 of murdering 13 people at a military base and trying to kill many more, is set to be highly unusual.

Not only will the Dec. 3 death sentence be livestreamed for the very first time in American history, according to an Oct. 8 announcement by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, but it will also be the first military execution in the United States in about 65 years.

Hegseth confirmed on social media his plan to offer a live viewing feed of the killing – an announcement that has sparked bipartisan criticism and comparisons to public executions carried out by authoritarian regimes.

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Hasan was an army psychiatrist who opened fire on fellow service members on Nov. 5, 2009, inside the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, at Fort Hood, Texas, where soldiers were preparing for deployment. He was shot several times by responding officers and is now paralyzed from the waist down. His victims included soldiers and one civilian employee.

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More Military Assassinations in the Caribbean

The US military announced this week that it had killed four “narco-terrorists” by blowing up another boat in the Caribbean. This now brings the military death toll from these types of military boat killings to 235 people.

I have addressed these types of killings in the past, but as long as the US national-security establishment continues to engage in them, it is important to continue highlighting the evil nature of these killings.

There are several points that I wish to emphasize about these boat killings:

1. Simply because it is the military doing the killing does not mean that wartime rules apply. That’s because the military is operating in a police capacity by enforcing the US “war on drugs.” The drug “war” is not real war — that’s just a figure of speech. Ordinarily, it is the DEA or the local police who are enforcing America’s decades-old drug war. Here, the military is stepping into the shoes of the DEA by helping to enforce the federal government’s drug laws. That means that the same principles of criminal justice apply to the military as they do to the DEA. The fact that US officials claim to be “at war” against drug dealers is obviously just a ruse to enable them to ignore the Constitution.

2. The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution expressly prohibits federal officials from depriving people of life without due process of law, which necessarily means charging people with crimes and according them a trial. That’s obviously not what the military is doing with its killings of those people in boats on the high seas. No criminal indictment. No trial. No opportunity to contest the government’s evidence or accusation. Simply summary executions  based on the government’s unilateral determination that the occupants are drug traffickers.

3. Given the lack of due process of law, the military killings of these boat people operate as state-inflicted assassinations. One big advantage of using the military, rather than the DEA, to commit these assassinations is that military operations traditionally receive extraordinary judicial deference, especially when the executive branch invokes national security and armed conflict.

4. It is the height of hypocrisy to have the military enforcing criminal laws outside the United States, given that US law prohibits the military from enforcing criminal laws inside the United States. If it’s a bad idea for the military to be involved in law enforcement against Americans, then it’s a bad idea for the military to be involved in law enforcement against foreign citizens.

5. The killings amount to military cowardice, akin to a federal official shooting a criminal suspect in the back. Given the overwhelming power of the military, it could easily approach people in boats and demand that they surrender. Instead, the military chooses to kill them, knowing that for all practical purposes. the victims pose no danger whatsoever to the powerful military armada charged with killing them. After all, given that the Coast Guard’s policy is based on stopping boats, searching them, taking suspects into custody, and returning suspects to the U.S for trial, there is no good reason why the military can’t follow that same policy.

6. The omnipotent, non-reviewable military power to assassinate people in the enforcement of the federal government’s drug war arguably applies to everyone, including Americans. The fact that the US government is exercising its assassination power against drug-war suspects here in the United States as of now doesn’t mean that it can’t exercise such power in the future.

7. The fact that the military claims to have “intelligence” pointing toward criminal culpability of the victims is irrelevant from both a legal and a moral standpoint. Under America’s original criminal-justice principles, any such “intelligence” must be tested in a court of law, especially since it oftentimes proves to be faulty. Moreover, as most people know by now, federal officials have been known to make up or concoct evidence as a way to frame people who they are convinced are criminals. That’s one of the reasons we have trials in America’s criminal-justice system rather than have the DEA or the cops simply shoot and kill drug-war suspects.

8. These military drug-war killings are what we would expect from authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, such as North Korea, Vietnam, or Saudi Arabia, not with a nation that professes adherence to due process of law.

9. The military’s boat killings reflect a deep denigration of the value of human life, especially for foreign citizens.

10. The drug-war killings constitute a grave violation of God’s sacred commandment against murder.

11. The military’s boat killings are no different in principle from what former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is being criminally prosecuted for by the International Criminal Court. He stands accused of ordering his officials to summarily kill drug war suspects without according them due process of law.

12. Regardless of how many people the US military kills in the enforcement of the federal government’s drug laws, the drug war will never be “won.” It will go on forever, with the national-security establishment and the rest of the federal government gaining ever-more destructive power over both Americans and foreigners — brutal police-state power that will continue to destroy people’s liberty and privacy.

13. No government, including the US government, wields the legitimate moral authority to punish anyone for possessing, ingesting, or distributing any drug whatsoever. In a genuinely free society, people have the right to possess, ingest, or distribute any drug they want.

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Border Patrol Unleashes Violence on Protesters Over Trump’s Border Wall

Since construction began on President Donald Trump’s border wall in haste on October 5, federal agents have clashed with land defenders and arrested roughly two dozen activists who camped out on private land to protest the destruction of fragile desert ecosystems on both sides of the imaginary line that separates Mexico from the tiny town of Lochiel, Arizona.

The protest received media attention after Border Patrol agents extracted and arrested a tree sitter and cut down the “Grandmother Tree,” an ancient cottonwood in a grove of several trees that stood in the way of contractors building the border wall. Estimated to be around 200 years old — older than the current border — the grove’s branches reached from the United States to Mexico, a symbol of international solidarity for the protesters.

The felling of the Grandmother Tree may have also symbolized the Trump administration’s disregard for nature and public opinion, but it did not mark the end of the protests, as construction continues. Video captured by journalist Max Granger shows land defenders climbing into a tree on the Mexican side Tuesday morning and setting up another tree-sit style blockade in a renewed attempt to halt construction. Clashes with Border Patrol continued throughout that day, with activists accusing federal agents of dragging protesters across a barbed wire fence during a chaotic confrontation that was caught on video.

On Wednesday afternoon, a protester locked themselves to moving construction machinery, according to a statement from activists. Border Patrol agents attempted to remove the protester with “extreme pain compliance” and pepper sprayed the surrounding crowd, the activists said. Protester continued to lock themselves down after construction came to a halt and construction crews left, the activists noted. “We do not intend to back down,” said Adriana, a Tierra Libre activist identified only by first name, in a statement on Wednesday. “Our resolve only grows with their violence.”

Jason, an activist from the Tierra Libre protest camp in Lochiel who declined to use his last name due to concerns over state repression, said roughly two dozen people have been arrested. Some received citations on the spot, and others were taken into custody and released onto the streets of Nogales or Tucson hours later, he noted.

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Axios Looks for Silver Lining in Trump’s Tinfoil Economy

Axios (10/5/26) thinks it’s spotted a mystery: “President Trump’s economic data keeps getting stronger. His economic polling keeps getting worse by the day.”

Or as the political news site put it in an earlier story (9/30/26): “America’s economy is roaring ahead. And Americans feel lousy about it.”

As both stories note, people don’t feel like the economy is “roaring ahead.” So what’s the proof that they’re wrong? As is its wont, Axios provides bullet points in the October 5 piece to lay out the “ample evidence the economy is, statistically speaking, relatively strong.”

First up: “Economic growth is solid and accelerating.” The link that backs that up goes to the September 30 piece, which reported, “The economy grew at a 2.2% annualized rate in the second quarter, a sharp upgrade from the 1.5% previously reported.”

Is 2.2% growth “relatively strong,” though? Average annual GDP growth since 1947 is 3.2%, a full percentage point higher. If that seems like too long a time frame for comparison, the Biden years—a period when the economy was rarely described as “roaring ahead” or “relatively strong”—averaged 3.7% annual GDP growth. Leaving out 2021—an exceptional year when the economy bounced back strongly from the Covid recession—still leaves Biden’s economy growing at 2.8% a year.

Relatively speaking, then, Trump’s growth is rather weak. It’s not “accelerating,” either; over the six quarters so far of Trump’s second term, the average annual growth rate has been 2.2%—the same as in the most recent quarter.

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Trump Treasury Blocks $175 Million In Federal Payments To Dead Recipients

The Treasury Department blocked $175 million in federal payments from going to deceased recipients in fiscal year 2026 as the Trump administration expanded efforts to prevent fraud and improper government spending.

Treasury screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling approximately $3.7 trillion during the fiscal year, identifying and returning about 13,500 payments that otherwise would have gone to people listed as deceased, according to the department.

The results represent another step in President Donald Trump’s push to tighten safeguards around taxpayer money. Access to Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system expanded from roughly 4 percent of federal programs at the end of fiscal 2025 to 99 percent in fiscal 2026.

“Treasury continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

The administration’s efforts received praise from Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who spent years pushing legislation giving Treasury permanent access to Social Security death records.

“Unless you were playing Frisbee in the quad during Econ 101, you know the federal government shouldn’t be sending taxpayer money to dead people,” Kennedy said.

Congress advanced legislation to permanently authorize the Social Security Administration to share its full Death Master File with Treasury’s Do Not Pay system, giving federal agencies more complete death information when determining eligibility for payments.

Treasury has also added safeguards to verify bank account ownership and Taxpayer Identification Numbers associated with federal payments. Those capabilities became fully operational Sept. 30, allowing Treasury to flag payments that fail verification before the money leaves government coffers.

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Clinton-Appointed Judge Sides with Illegal Aliens Against Trump’s Civil Immigration Fines

A federal judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton sided with illegal aliens who were fined by President Donald Trump’s administration for civil immigration violations.

For more than a year, the Trump administration has used civil immigration fines to incentivize illegal aliens to self-deport from the United States. As of July of this year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has levied more than $84 billion in fines against about 103,000 illegal aliens in the United States.

This week, Judge George A. O’Toole, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by Clinton, sided with a pair of illegal aliens the Trump administration fined, claiming that DHS violated federal law when issuing its final rule that permitted the use of the fines.

“The plaintiffs here face assessment and possible collection of enormous fines well beyond their capacity to pay,” O’Toole wrote of the two plaintiffs:

Maria L., a nail technician on a variable salary, was issued a significant fine in the hundreds of thousands. A victim of political violence in her home country, she reports that the fine has affected her health, increased her anxiety, caused depression, and led to her missing work for a month. [Emphasis added]

Nancy M. was fined over 1.8 million dollars. She is a laborer working over sixty hours a week with two jobs, and she reports feeling serious anxiety affecting her ability to sleep, eat, and live a normal life. Given the amount of the fines, the plaintiffs face the possibility of garnishment of wages and bank accounts, seized assets such as vehicles and homes, IRS reports, federal collections suits, and adverse future admissibility determinations. [Emphasis added]

O’Toole granted the motion to stay that was sought by the plaintiffs in the case, preventing the Trump administration from collecting such fines on illegal aliens.

Trump administration officials previously told Breitbart News that the fines are critical to getting illegal aliens to self-deport from the United States.

The case is Maria L. v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-13471 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

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Pentagon Prepares ‘Options’ For Trump To Strike Iran Before Midterms; Tanker Attacked Off Qatar

The Atlantic is reporting Wednesday afternoon that the Pentagon is preparing strike options for the Commander-in-Chief to consider, and that Trump may actually pull the trigger before the midterm elections – though the report emphasizes that the decision is still being debated:

After months of on-again, off-again fighting, the United States hasn’t struck Iran in several weeks. The stretch of relative tranquility is coinciding with the final phase of the midterm-election campaign, and the assumption has been that President Trump will want to keep it going through November 3 so as not to remind voters of an unpopular war that is dragging Republican candidates down nationwide.

But that may not be what happens. The White House has asked the Pentagon to develop strike options against Iranian targets that could be exercised ahead of the midterms, according to two administration officials. The planning underscores just how much the president wants to reduce gas prices and demonstrate progress in the conflict before the vote, administration officials told us.

And yet a renewed outbreak of direct bombing would likely actually serve to do the opposite, given oil prices have tended to shoot up on headlines of major direct escalation.

Reports out of Iran confirmed earlier Wednesday that negotiations are ‘stalemated’ – also as the Iranians have ramped up targeting tankers with drones in the Strait of Hormuz over the last week.

One peculiar and notable line from The Atlantic report is that Trump and the Republicans are looking for “some sort of victory” in a war that they promised would be swift and decisive, but instead has drifted into a seven-month quagmire:

The plans are being developed by U.S. Central Command, which is coordinating the war effort, a U.S. official told us. Even the plans’ advocates acknowledge that limited strikes would not, by themselves, bring Iran to the negotiating table, restore safe travel through the Strait of Hormuz, or lower gas prices before Election Day. But those in favor believe that further action after months of uneasy peace could allow Trump to demonstrate strength and potentially declare some sort of victory, giving Republicans much-needed momentum heading into the election. 

Tehran has constantly signaled its military is at the ‘ready’ and that it is continuing to build up its ballistic missile arsenal, even as its exports have dropped dramatically due to the US naval blockade. Meanwhile…

Wednesay (10/7): A tanker was hit by “multiple projectiles” about 51 nautical miles north of Qatar.

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Senator Says Hegseth Barred Him From Gulf Base to ‘Cover Up the True Cost’ of Iran War

A US senator visiting the Persian Gulf said Tuesday that the Pentagon blocked him from inspecting a heavily damaged American military installation and refused to arrange a briefing on the Iran War, accusing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of mounting an “unprecedented” effort to conceal the conflict’s costs and consequences from lawmakers and the public.

“This trip confirmed for me that there is an active, unprecedented, unconstitutional effort underway to hide the costs of this war and the implications of this war from Congress and the American people,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told reporters Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Murphy said he sought to inspect Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military installation in the Middle East and a crucial hub for American operations in the region. The base was struck by Iranian missiles during the opening days of the war and sustained heavy damage, including a direct hit to its Combined Air Operations Center.

“I’ve never encountered anything like this in my time in the Senate,” the senator said, describing the Pentagon’s actions as “part of a deliberate campaign of obfuscation that my Republican colleagues in Congress should demand an end to.”

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DNC Sues Trump Administration Alleging Illegal Propaganda Campaign

The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, accusing it of using taxpayer funding to craft political advertisements ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The DNC filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging that millions of dollars were spent on what amounts to government propaganda, according to the Associated Press.

The DNC complaint also claimed that Trump personally directed the ads and wants the court to declare them illegal.

This comes despite Trump saying on Monday that he would pay for future ads using his super PAC, adding that they are a “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.”

The ads began airing in September and are estimated to have cost $12 million so far.

DNC Chair Ken Martin said this is Trump’s “last-ditch attempt to save Republicans in November.”

“Americans deserve better than to have their hard-earned tax dollars used for Trump’s illegal schemes,” he declared.

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Wall Street Expected To Have Its Best Year Ever As Americans Drown In Debt

Money is flooding Wall Street as Americans thirst for financial relief amid war-fueled inflation and soaring household debt.

New York’s securities industry is on pace to blow past last year’s record profits, according to a new report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Wall Street firms made $45.9 billion in just the first half of 2026, already eclipsing what New York City expected them to make for the entire year. (RELATED: Wall Street Banks Finance Both Sides Of America’s AI Race With China)

The money has poured in as companies race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure, businesses return to the dealmaking table and investors trade through a year marked by war, tariffs and market swings, the Comptroller’s report found. Virtually every major Wall Street revenue stream grew during the first half of the year, with underwriting seeing particularly strong gains.

Wall Street’s boom looks much different from the economy many Americans are living in. Families have rationed showers and hauled water from creeks as water bills climb into the hundreds of dollars, while gasoline prices have risen sharply and record diesel costs threaten to make already expensive grocery bills even worse due to the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

Many Americans are leaning increasingly on borrowed money. Household debt has continued to climb, with consumers carrying growing credit card and auto loan balances as high interest rates make that debt more expensive to service, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Credit cards have become a particularly costly pressure point. Americans now owe more than $1 trillion on their cards, Fed data show, while credit card delinquencies have climbed to levels not seen since the aftermath of the Great Recession. Total household debt had climbed to a record $18.8 trillion in the first quarter of 2026.

Meanwhile, billions continue pouring into AI and Wall Street is preparing for another potentially record-breaking payday.

Venture capital investment in AI companies reached $407 billion during the first half of the year, already dwarfing the amount invested throughout 2025, the report found. The spending has helped buoy markets even as investors question whether companies can eventually make enough money to justify the enormous sums flowing into the technology.

Big Tech companies are increasingly borrowing to finance the data centers, chips and power infrastructure behind the AI boom. Amazon, Google, Meta and other tech giants are now competing with governments for investors’ cash as they flood debt markets with new borrowing.

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