10/23/202

 Thursday, October 23, 2025

1943 First Jewish transport out of Rome reached Birkenau

1973 Richard Nixon agreed to turn over White House tape recordings to Judge John Sirica

1983 Suicide terrorist truck bomb killed 243 US personnel in Beirut

1991 Clarence Thomas was sworn in as US Supreme Court Justice

In bed at at 9:15 after sleeping perhaps an hour on the recliner, up at 6 this morning!  Lower left leg still aching when vertical, but not the sharp pain I experienced last night that had me thinking of the ER again.  39°, wind chill 28°, high of 49°.  I was tempted to light a log in the fireplace but held off.  Soon enough.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at   a.m.  

LTMW after brunch, I see my first migrator, other than the snowbirds, a beautiful white-throated sparrow.

Donald J. Trump: Murderer, Stick-up artist, thief, and public vandal.  From the current The Atlantic online:

Trump to DOJ: Pay Up - The goal is not just dictatorial power, but ostentatious performance.

By Quinta Jurecic

OCTOBER 22, 2025, 1:49 PM ET

Donald Trump is a skilled extortionist. Since winning the 2024 presidential election, he has secured $16 million from Paramount to settle a baseless lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris; pocketed another $16 million from ABC after suing the company for defamation; and scooped up almost $60 million combined from the tech giants Meta, Alphabet, and X to resolve lawsuits over his social-media bans following the insurrection on January 6, 2021. Now he is extorting a new target: the federal government itself.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump has filed paperwork claiming that the Justice Department owes him roughly $230 million in taxpayer funds—damages that he claims are due to him in compensation for the federal investigations into his conduct related to the January 6 insurrection and his improper hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The corruption is so obvious that even the president himself seemed to acknowledge it when questioned by journalists about the Times’s reporting. “I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk,” Trump said, “and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

Trump is not, in the immediate instance, “the one that makes the decision.” That will be up to Justice Department leadership—specifically, under DOJ’s procedures, the department’s No. 2 or No. 3, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche or Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward. Blanche led Trump’s criminal defense against the prosecutions for which Trump is now demanding payment. Woodward has represented a number of Trump aides, including Trump’s co-defendant in the Mar-a-Lago case, Walt Nauta, and the current FBI director, Kash Patel.

Trump’s apparent confidence that he will be able to secure the money speaks to the degree of control he has secured over the Justice Department. He is, fundamentally, instructing his subordinates to place an enormous chunk of public funds into his own bank account. Technically, perhaps Blanche or Woodward could recuse themselves from the proceedings or even decline to hand over the cash; in practice, it is hard to imagine this happening without Trump firing them. This direct command by the president over the Justice Department is bolstered by a vision of presidential power known as the “unitary executive,” under which all executive power flows from the president himself. The notion that Trump could simply tell the Justice Department to pay up, and that the department would have to do so, seems bizarre—but it shares an outlandish through line with the administration’s expansive view of consolidated presidential authority over the executive branch.

Most of us recognize that Trump is not only an extortionist and a thief of public funds, but also a murderer due to his summary executions of alleged drug smugglers at sea, a manslaughterer due to the certain deaths of those condemned by the destruction of USAID food and medical programs, and now, in one of his lesser crimes, he has become a public vandal, completely destroying the East Wing of the White House to build his Mar-a-Lago-esque ballroom where 999 people can come to worship him.  Perhaps we should call it the White House Basilica.  He has already turned the Oval Office into a tawdry, cheesy, lurid showplace of his Beverly Hillbillies tastelessness, but I suppose that was his right as its legal tenant for the four years.  Presumably, the gold appliqué on the walls and ceiling will remain, but at least the crudely ostentatious golden gewgaws on the fireplace mantle will be replaced with something less reminiscent of Jedd Clampett and more befitting a sober head of state.  But now he is tearing down the East Wing and building his basilica, and this vandalism won't be remediable.   The East Wing was built by FDR in 1942, during World War II, to provide additional office space and an underground air raid shelter for the First Family and White House staff.  Aesthetically and architecturally, it balanced the West Wing which had been built in 1902 by the other Roosevelt, Teddy.  Two of the greatest American presidents made these permanent changes to the Presidential Mansion for public, governmental reasons, and now the worst president in American history is, on a personal whim, leaving his mark on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  I would call it shameful, but is the word appropriate for one who knows no shame?

Her Optimism Has Won Her Some of the Most Powerful Enemies in the World, in the New York Times, Oct. 16, 2025, by Masha Gessen.  Excerpts:

[Francesca] Albanese became a hometown hero after the White House branded her an enemy, which it did because of her work, over the past three years, as the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories. In the course of that work, she has pursued strategies that are as legally ambitious as they are politically risky. She has documented human rights abuses, as her predecessors did. She infuriated some of her allies by condemning the Hamas violence of Oct. 7, 2023, then caused a storm when she leaped onto social media to contest a boilerplate statement by the president of France that framed the violence as antisemitic. Perhaps most explosively, she has called out the corporations, including some of the largest in the United States, that enable and benefit from human rights abuses, and which are likely to continue to do so, regardless of the cease-fire.

In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was imposing sanctions on her. She became a “specially designated national,” a status generally reserved for arms and drug smugglers, terrorists, and oligarchs who have funded them. People on the list cannot travel to the United States. They lose access to any assets they may have in the country, cannot do business with U.S. companies and can’t use U.S. currency — which means that they cannot engage in most international financial transactions.

Under President Trump, sanctions have been used to target defenders of Palestinian rights, including three prominent Palestinian human rights organizations that were punished for having “directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals.” The I.C.C.’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has been subjected to sanctions, as have additional I.C.C. prosecutors and judges. Trump’s administration placed sanctions on I.C.C. officials during his first term, too, when the court was said to be investigating American actions in Afghanistan. In his second term, he has been waging a campaign apparently aimed at destroying the institutions of international justice altogether.

The job of special rapporteur — Albanese’s job — is unpaid. Many of these positions are held by men of retirement age. Albanese is much younger than any of her seven direct predecessors, and is the first woman to hold the position for the Palestinian territories. Her husband, Massimiliano Cali, is an economist with the World Bank. They are members of the tribe of international humanitarian workers: scrappy, fearless, perpetually unmoored. For the past few years, they have lived in Tunisia. (They were in Italy for the summer, staying with Albanese’s mother, who has Alzheimer’s.) They have lived in Washington, D.C., where Albanese lectured at Georgetown and where their first child was born.

For almost three years, starting in 2010, they lived in the West Bank. What Albanese saw there shocked her — in part, she admits, because Israeli settlers “look like me. I’m sorry, I have my biases as well. I couldn’t make sense that people who are Western educated could be so barbaric toward other human beings. So violent and so casual about it.” 

. . . .   

On July 2, Albanese released her report, titled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.” She named companies, including Lockheed Martin and Caterpillar, which have provided physical equipment for the destruction in Gaza, and Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Palantir, which have contributed sophisticated technology and software that Israel has used in its war effort. She called out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for conducting research for the Israeli Defense Ministry.

A week later, the Trump administration announced the sanctions against her. She would be unable to attend the U.N. General Assembly or any other meetings at the headquarters in New York. She and Cali could lose an apartment in D.C., the only property they’ve ever bought. Albanese may also lose access to services provided by American corporations. That could include social media, email, Zoom and other video conferencing technology, and even the operating system on her computer. If that happens, she told me she’d get the message out through friendly contacts who can post on social media. People used to fight oppression without technology, she reminds herself.  

Brunch with CBG this morning.  Much good discussion about life.   

We signed a contract for the replacement of our front sidewalk this morning.  Almost $4,000, whew!

Exchange of FB Messenger texts with JPG:

Janine

Chuck—I thought you should know Eva Soeka died this week. After losing Pat Gorence recently, I am watching my contemporaries fall..but I suspect you know what that feels like. I do not know if you noticed but we have moved to a “condo/ranch in Grafton (just south of Cosco). We are still struggling to sell our house in Bayside. Are you and Geri interested in me bringing over a lunch some day so we could catch up?

You sent

Hi, Janine.  Thanks so much for sharing this news, unwelcome as it is.    I attended Pat’ visitation and was able to chat for awhile with John about her and about the DR and his helpfulness at Hogar Lubi.  It’s getting lonely out here, isn’t it?  Geri and I would always be thrilled to see you or Mike, either or both of you.  I think of you very often and always warmly❤️.    Other than occasional trips to the VA Medical Center, I am pretty much a hearth mouse now.

 

You sent

Also, you don't have to bring lunch.  We're happy to pop for lunch😁!

 Headline in today's JSOnline: Mother of children found in Milwaukee storage unit pleads not guilty, Drake Bentley,   Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The mother of the six children found in a locked storage unit last month has pleaded not guilty to child neglect charges.  Azyia Zielinski, 27, of Milwaukee, was bound over for trial on Oct. 22 after a motion to dismiss was denied.

The children's father, 33-year-old Charles A. Dupriest, of Milwaukee, is also facing child neglect charges in connection to the case. He is set to appear in court Oct. 23.  According to a criminal complaint, Milwaukee police discovered six children, ages 2 months, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9, inside a locked StorSafe storage unit at 5555 N. 27th St. on Sept. 16. 

 The parents told police they had been kicked out of a community shelter. Police described a "putrid" smell emanating from the unit.

It seems that in our so-very-Christian nation, we are more interested in prosecuting these parents than in helping them obtain safe shelter for their family.  The parents were sleeping in their car with the family dog when the children were sheltered in the storage locker.  They were near-destitute and had no place other than stay.  What were they to do?  Just askin'.