United States | News & Politics

A trio of newspapers that cover Missouri’s capital city and surrounding communities will now be run by a familiar and polarizing figure in state politics whose career has been marked by scandal.

Scott Faughn announced on Monday that his company was taking over the Jefferson City News-Tribune, Fulton Sun and California Democrat from Arkansas-based WEHCO Media Inc., which has owned the papers since 2008.

Faughn, whose company currently publishes an online compendium of press releases and opinion pieces called the Missouri Times, said in a press release that all three newspapers will continue to operate under their current names and locations. Employees, he said, will remain in their current positions.

Stephen Prager
Dec 28, 2025

US Rep. Ro Khanna defended California’s proposed tax on extreme wealth Saturday after a pair of prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists threatened to launch a primary bid for his California House seat.

The proposal, which advocates are gathering signatures to place on the ballot in 2026, would impose a one-time 5% tax on those with net worths over $1 billion to recoup about $90 billion in Medicaid funds stripped from the state by this year’s Republican budget law. The roughly 200 billionaires affected would have five years to pay the tax.

There's a reason why the civilised world sneers at the US

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7169768

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/15824

A pro-police group is reportedly planning to ask the Department of Justice to investigate an elected prosecutor over allegations that he’s been lenient toward undocumented immigrants.

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit best known for backing police facing legal consequences for their actions, plans to ask the federal government to use a provision previously used to probe police violations of civil rights to investigate the office of Fairfax County, Virginia, Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano over his handling of cases involving undocumented immigrants, Fox News reported.

“This kind of legal warfare erodes trust in our justice system.”

The Trump administration recently put Descano in the spotlight when it attacked his office over claims that he dropped charges against a 23-year-old undocumented immigrant who was accused of killing a man the next day. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has also blamed former President Joe Biden’s administration for dismissing the man’s immigration proceedings and labeling him as “a non-enforcement priority.”

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund is invoking the same provision of federal law that the Biden administration previously used to investigate police in Louisville, Kentucky, after they killed Breonna Taylor in 2020. The law calls for policing to abide by the Constitution and establishes procedures for when police display a “pattern or practice of conduct” that violates civil rights.

Now, the pro-police group wants to argue that prosecutors like Descano are discriminating against the public by favoring undocumented immigrants in prosecutorial decisions. The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund is effectively arguing that a pattern of leniency toward immigrants by Descano constitutes discrimination against American citizens.

“The MO of MAGA groups like LELDF is to partner with the Trump Administration to weaponize the justice system and go after people they don’t like — in this case, reform prosecutors they disagree with philosophically,” said Michael Collins, an independent consultant who works on prosecutorial reform.

“Laws designed to protect people’s rights and curb official misconduct shouldn’t be repurposed to target officials over policy differences or prosecutorial discretion,” Collins said. “This kind of legal warfare erodes trust in our justice system and undermines the very protections these laws were meant to uphold.”

Neither Descano nor the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund immediately responded to a request for comment.

[

Related

Oakland Homicides Dropped 30 Percent. The County Still Recalled Its Prosecutor.](https://theintercept.com/2024/11/22/pamela-price-recall-criminal-justice-reform/)

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund has made attacking elected prosecutors a cornerstone of its work in recent years. This year, the group released a report focusing on the Wren Collective, an organization that works with progressive prosecutors around the country, and claimed that left-wing donors like George Soros are controlling the group and corrupting the criminal justice system.

In Virginia, the group has been trying to remove Descano and another elected prosecutor in Arlington County, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, since shortly after they first won office, though so far the police group has gotten little traction.

Descano has faced two efforts to launch recall elections against him, both organized by groups headed by Sean Kennedy, who directs policy for the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and leads another group, Virginians for Safe Communities, which tried to launch a recall against Descano in 2021.

The LELDF spends about three-quarters of its program service budget on public and media relations, according to its most recent tax filing. About a quarter of its program service expenses goes toward legal defense for cops.

Republicans have also made Descano a target. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has repeatedly attacked Descano’s office for turning the county “into a safe haven for criminals and a nightmare for law-abiding families” and his handling of cases involving transgender defendants.

The post Cop Group Alleges “Discrimination” by Prosecutor for Being Too Nice to Immigrants appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7169779

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/15825

Top Trump White House aide Stephen Miller on Friday elicited disgust after he said that a beloved Christmas television special reminded him of his own personal animus toward immigrants.

Miller, often seen as the architect of President Donald Trump's mass deportation policy, revealed in a post on X that he and his children had just watched "Christmas with The Martins and The Sinatras," a one-off 1967 TV holiday special that featured singers Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.

Miller then quickly pivoted from that to once again bash immigrants who come to the US.

"Imagine watching that," Miller wrote, "and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world."

As Rolling Stone politics reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez pointed out in response, both Martin and Sinatra both had parents who were first-generation Italian immigrants.

"Dean Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti and gave himself a stage name because of braindead xenophobes like Stephen," McCann Ramírez observed. "Sinatra was also a child of Italian immigrants. Imagine watching them and thinking immigrants didn’t build the culture you fetishize today."

A similar point was made by civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill in a post on Bluesky.

"Imagine watching Sinatra, son of Dolly and Antonini born in Genoa and Sicily, respectively," she wrote, "and Martin, son of Gaetano and Angela, born in Montesilvano, Italy and Ohio respectively... and crusading against the value of children of immigrants to the US."

Journalist and author Jeff Yang added some historical context to Miller's remarks by noting that Italian immigrants in the early and middle decades of the 20th century faced many of the same stereotypes that Miller and his political allies ascribe to immigrants from Latin America.

"A reminder," Yang wrote, while also posting old cartoons that featured racist depictions of Italians, "that Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra’s parents emigrated here during a period when Italians were considered to be a genetically inferior and criminal-minded underclass that Stephen Miller’s racist predecessors said should be excluded from America."

Yang added that Frank Sinatra's mother "ran an underground free abortion clinic, chained herself to a fence to fight for women’s suffrage, and was an extremely influential organizer for the Democratic Party."

Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse promoted Yang's thread that demonstrated Miller's apparent ignorance of Dean and Sinatra's family histories, and said it showed the Trump adviser is "a horrible racist in the sense that he is actually not that good at being racist."

Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum, managed to find an upside to Miller's holiday-themed anti-immigrant rant.

"The one silver lining in all this sickness is that one day your children will despise you as much as most of America already does," he commented.

Film producer Franklin Leonard was even more succinct in his response to Miller.

"Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra would hate Stephen Miller and his politics," he wrote.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Donald Trump has floated the idea of ending the filibuster – a procedural technique in Congress that allows a minority of senators to block legislation from passing – which would make pushing through his political agenda in 2026 much easier.

In an interview with Politico, the president urged Republicans in the Senate to scrap the filibuster, saying it had become an obstacle to effective governing and removing it would prevent another government shutdown and pave the way for his party to push through its legislative priorities.

“The filibuster is hurting the Republican Party,” Trump told Politico. He called on Republican lawmakers to eliminate it “without question”.

If Congress were to get rid of the filibuster, Trump added, “you can do everything. You can do great health care if you get rid of the filibuster. We can do everything we want.”

They say they're going to do something that rhymes with "grieve."

Twenty GOP Zoomers on Trump, Hitler, dating, racism, politics, the economy, and more

https://archive.ph/pnWpI

A new study suggests that distressed borrowers using a simpler bankruptcy process are succeeding — and that more people like them should try.

The process which enables this was introduced during the Biden administration.

Richard Luscombe
Fri 26 Dec 2025 11.00 EST

It is a ritual that began in August, a month after the opening of the remote detention camp celebrated by Donald Trump for its harsh conditions, and hailed by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, as a model for the president’s aggressive detention and deportation agenda.

The open air vigils continued, and grew in size, through the brutal heat and torrential rains of the south Florida summer. They endured through a federal judge’s order in August that “Alligator Alcatraz” should close, and a subsequent reversal by an appeals court; the protesters’ voices grew louder at alleged human rights abuses and violence inflicted on detainees.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40754419

Donny’s feeling the heat. Keep the fire going. Let’s make 2026 the year of accountability

President Donald Trump has called on the Justice Department to release the names of all Democrats tied to Jeffrey Epstein, as he called the controversy over the so-called Epstein files a “witch hunt” and a “Democrat inspired hoax.”

“Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax,” Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social. 

“When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc. The Dems are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country! The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein - Just another Witch Hunt,” he added.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/politics/p/1607888/us-measles-cases-surge-to-highest-level-in-30-years

This year's spikes in measles cases could cause the U.S. to lose its "elimination status" by next year after the CDC reports nearly 2,000 cases and 50 outbreaks nationwide.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers in Yakima, Washington, spent Christmas Eve arresting a man in a Walmart parking lot—even taking his already purchased groceries for themselves.

Four ICE officers in masks and tactical gear can be seen in a video surrounding a man with a car full of food while he loads it into his car. A woman watching the arrest asked ICE if she could take down the phone number of the man’s wife to let her know her husband had been detained. The ICE agents refused.

“No, guess he should’ve complied,” an agent said.