Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalBrazilian president says he has 'forbidden' Trump adviser from visiting country
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has said he has “forbidden” one of Donald Trump’s advisers from visiting the South American country in retaliation for his health minister being denied a US visa.
Darren Beattie, a far-right political strategist who was recently tapped for a senior advisory role on Brazil, had reportedly hoped to use a trip to the country to visit the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup to stop Lula taking power after the 2022 election. Beattie is a longstanding critic of Brazil’s judiciary and president and once called the moderate leftwing leader a representative of “the most destructive and corrosive version” of communism.
On Friday, after a supreme court judge refused Beattie permission to visit the incarcerated politician, Lula announced he had given orders for the Trump aide’s visa to be revoked.
“That American guy who said he was coming here to visit Bolsonaro, he’s been barred from visiting and I have forbidden him from coming to Brazil so long as they don’t free up the visa of my health minister, which has been blocked,” Lula said during an event at a trauma centre in Rio de Janeiro.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/13/brazilian-president-lula-forbidden-trump-adviser-darren-beattie-visiting
Good for him!
Pete Hegseth attacks media for not being positive enough about US attacks on Iran
Pete Hegseth on Friday again claimed the US military campaign against Iran has been an unprecedented success, using a Pentagon press conference to accuse journalists of downplaying Washington’s supposed gains on the battlefield.
Speaking alongside the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, the US defense secretary claimed Iran had been left without a functioning air force, navy or missile defense network after 13 days of strikes, and said the combined US-Israeli air campaign had hit more than 15,000 targets since the war began.
“The United States is decimating the radical Iranian regime’s military in a way the world has never seen before,” Hegseth told reporters.
He said Iranian ballistic missile production capacity had been “functionally defeated” and that their leaders were cowering underground, because “that’s what rats do”. In fact, some of Iran’s most senior leaders – including the president, Masoud Pezeshkian; the security chief, Ali Larijani; and the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi – were today seen on video marching through Tehran for the annual Quds Day rally.
Hegseth also claimed Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei – who was elected by the Assembly of Experts on 8 March following the assassination of his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – was “wounded and likely disfigured”. The claim has not been independently verified.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/pete-hegseth-iran-was-us-press
Was Kegsbreath even alive during Vietnam? Media remembers, whether some of the reporters now alive do or not---they can research.
Why House Republicans are starting to fear the worst about the midterms
House Republican leaders are publicly projecting confidence about their chances of holding the majority in the midterms. Privately, many of their members sound far less certain.
Gathered this week at a Trump-owned resort in Doral, Florida, to coordinate strategy for the rest of the legislative year and the looming campaign season, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., struck an upbeat tone, telling reporters, “Do not bet against the House Republicans” as they try to maintain their narrow edge in the chamber.
But beneath the public optimism, there is deep frustration — and, in some cases, outright pessimism — simmering inside Johnson’s conference.
“No one thinks we’re keeping the majority except for the speaker,” one House Republican, who requested anonymity to discuss the internal sentiment, told MS NOW.
The lawmaker suggested Johnson’s confidence was less a reflection of the mood inside the conference and more about the impossible position he’s in.
https://www.ms.now/news/house-republicans-midterms-majority-2026
They're panicky? Good.
Wind is blowing 8 bells here
At least! Branches down everywhere and stuff hitting the roof like grenades. I'm assuming thost's whatever walnuts hadn't blown down in the windstorn last whbenever it was. This wind is coming from the southwest so I hope it's bringing warmer weather. I was planning on going to the groce3ry store but I don't really want to get blown all over the road so I think I'll stay home and fix dinner from whatever I have.
Hope thowe of you in tornado alley are safe! Take cover if not.
The need to look cool has Patel in a chokehold. An FBI training debacle proves it.
A Thursday press release from the FBI should make us all deeply aware of how strange a time we live in. According to that announcement, a group of current and former mixed martial arts fighters affiliated with UFC will be conducting a training seminar this weekend for students at the FBI’s academy. While it’s difficult to discern any benefit to future FBI agents, the move does illustrate that FBI Director Kash Patel’s desire to appear cool has him in a chokehold.
Between flying around the country with his younger girlfriend and his extremely official and not at all personal trip to Italy, where he had a locker-room bro moment with the gold-winning U.S. men’s Olympic ice hockey team, Patel is living out a specific version of a Gen X male fantasy from atop the nation’s top law enforcement agency. Getting to show off his close relationship with UFC fighters just adds one more layer to the towering construct of manliness he’s building for himself on the back of the bureau’s reputation.
In his statement about the alliance, Patel praised UFC CEO Dana White — who is a friend of President Donald Trump — saying that White “has changed the game in the mixed martial arts industry and we’re extremely honored to be partnered with him, the professionals, and the UFC.”
According to the release, the UFC’s MMA athletes will “provide insight into how they train for competition, as well as demonstrate specific techniques and tactics, offering a unique perspective to the students as they prepare to enter the field office.” The statement did not specify which situations these future agents could encounter that would make MMA techniques especially helpful.
https://www.ms.now/opinion/fbi-ufc-training-kash-patel-quantico
Seriously, KashYAP? Almost (not quite) makes you wish for the days of J. Edgar. He was an asshole, but not incompetent!
Trump knows he's losing on immigration -- and he doesn't know how to turn things around
Here’s a clear sign President Donald Trump knows his approach to immigration is losing in the court of public opinion. White House deputy chief of staff James Blair “privately urged House Republicans on Tuesday to stop emphasizing ‘mass deportations’ and instead focus their messaging on removing violent criminals,” Axios reported this week, citing sources in the room.
But this proposed “fix” is almost certainly a lost cause.
There is plenty of data showing Trump’s immigration agenda is not popular. According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in January, about 6 in 10 Americans said Trump has “gone too far” in sending federal immigration agents into U.S. cities, and about the same share disapproved of Trump’s overall handling of immigration. Approval of Trump’s overall handling of immigration has plunged about 10 percentage points from his first month in office, according to AP-NORC data. This pattern of decline in support for Trump’s immigration program has surfaced across many other surveys, and probably explains a good chunk of the decline in Trump’s overall approval ratings.
There are also warning signs that Trump’s coalition could fray over immigration: A Politico poll conducted in January found that 1 in 5 voters who supported Trump in 2024 think his mass deportation campaign is too aggressive.
What’s interesting is that this emerging political reality seems to be registering for Trump. As he announced that he was withdrawing immigration agents from Minneapolis in February, Trump spoke publicly of the need to use a “softer touch” on immigration enforcement. Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have fallen to their lowest level since September in what appears to be an ICE effort to go about its mass deportation project somewhat less conspicuously.
Yet such efforts to tweak the branding — including counseling Republicans to play up the deportations of “violent criminals” rather than immigrants more broadly — are doomed.
https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-immigration-mass-deportations-republicans
Ya done fucked up, son.
Hillary Clinton flipped the script on Republicans' Epstein theater
Republicans clearly hoped this week that by hauling both Clintons in front of the House Oversight Committee for questioning about Jeffrey Epstein, they could, at minimum, embarrass Democrats. But this gang only ended up embarrassing themselves. The former secretary of state handily turned what Republicans presumed would be a humiliating moment into her own political win — and showcased Republicans’ woefully unserious handling of the Epstein scandal in the process.
Any reasonable person might have wondered what the heck the House Oversight Committee, the panel that is supposed to be Congress’ watchdog over the executive branch, was doing wasting its time with Hillary Clinton. At least Bill Clinton knew Epstein in the early 2000s and flew on his plane numerous times. But as the former first lady said when she spoke to the press after her deposition, “I don’t know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein, I never went to his island, I never went to his homes, I never went to his offices.”
And that wasn’t all. “It then got at the end quite unusual,” she said, “because I started being asked about UFOs, and a series of questions about Pizzagate.” For some reason, they didn’t press her on whether NASA faked the moon landing.
This is the nature of the Republican response to the unending Epstein scandal: from Congress, the kind of buffoonery represented by the Clinton deposition; and from the administration, an insistence that Trump is unconnected to or “exonerated” from a scandal whose central figure long counted the president as a friend.
https://www.ms.now/opinion/hillary-clinton-epstein-deposition-house-republicans-scandal
talk about a witch hunt!
World Trump floats 'friendly takeover' of Cuba. What's his endgame?
U.S. President Donald Trump is musing about a "friendly takeover of Cuba" as his administration tightens its economic squeeze on the island's communist government.
Trump has moved to choke off much of Cuba's supply of crude oil, decimating the island's tourist industry and putting mounting pressure on the Cuban government to make some sort of deal with the White House.
"They're in a big deal of trouble," Trump said Friday in Washington. "They have no money. They have no anything right now, but they're talking with us, and maybe we'll have a friendly takeover of Cuba."
While Trump did not explain what he meant by a friendly takeover, experts on U.S. policy toward Cuba believe the president's tactics are likely more about creating business opportunities for American companies than about toppling the communist regime of President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Trump said last week he wants to "make a deal" with the Cuban authorities and said Secretary of State Marco Rubio — the son of Cuban immigrants — is leading the talks.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-us-cuba-strategy-9.7095719
It's all about making Cuba safe for Kushner
ICE agents said to have posed as police, a tactic some fear could erode trust in real cops
The 911 call came in at 6:32 a.m. on Thursday: Two “suspicious” men wearing dark clothing were lingering inside a Columbia University residential building.
But when New York Police Department officers were dispatched to the scene, they came across U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents in the midst of an unusually elaborate operation.
According to a statement later released by Columbia, the agents had gained access to the building by posing as police in search of a 5-year-old — going so far as to present a flyer of the “missing child” to a campus safety officer.
The ruse allowed them to make their way to the apartment of Ellie Aghayeva, an international student from Azerbaijan who immigration officials claim overstayed her visa. The NYPD officers arrived after the men had entered her apartment, a department spokesperson said. They confirmed the men were federal agents, then quickly left the building.
https://apnews.com/article/nypd-columbia-university-immigration-c9b0cd212ab3bad901aadb3d87a55149
This is not going to help either the police or ICE.
Transgender youths are targeted in Scouting America changes pushed by the Pentagon
Scouting America will alter several policies at the urging of the Pentagon, including one targeting transgender youths, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday as he pushes a campaign against military support for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Some of the changes mirror what the organization suggested to the Pentagon in January, including discontinuing its Citizenship in Society merit badge, introducing a Military Service merit badge and waiving registration fees for the children of military personnel.
Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has taken aim at the military’s partnership with Scouting America, decrying its historic rebrand in 2024 from the Boy Scouts of America and other changes in recent years that he sees as part of “woke culture” efforts that he wants to root out.
Hegseth said in a video posted on X that Scouting America will require its members to use their “biological sex at birth and not gender identity.” He said applications will list only options for male and female and the one checked must match the applicant’s birth certificate. The group would clarify that youths of opposite genders assigned at birth cannot share bathrooms, tents or other similar spaces, he said.
Hegseth said the Pentagon will “vigorously review” the changes Scouting America has made in six months and cease its support of the organization if it fails to comply.
https://apnews.com/article/scouting-america-pentagon-military-boy-scouts-14a5fc1521fcd1e51103638f6f504214
When did the Scouts become an arm of the Pentagon and become Shitler Youth? Did I miss something? I thought they were an arm of the Mormon Church.....
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