KPN
KPN's Journal"What's the deal with Pete Hegseth? Am I the only veteran that recognizes this guy's personality?"
Found this thread title/by chance at Reddit this morning ... seemed deserving of sharing here at DU, especially in light of it being posted in "Military - The largest military subreddit on reddit".
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Can we have a candid discussion on the type of guy SECDEF Hegseth appears to be? Specifically, I’d like to lead off the conversation around his high bar being mediocrity.
Let’s start with his military career. He was an infantry platoon leader for a time. Then it appears he was tasked at the S-9 (Civil Affairs). Then it appears he volunteered to teach COIN in Kabul. Then IRR. Then ARNG in DC.
Let’s unpack this. He’s an infantry officer. But he didn’t complete Ranger School, Airborne School, or Air Assault School – and he was assigned to the 101st. Why not? I spent the vast majority of my time in the Army in the heavy side of things (1AD/1CD/18ABN), and as a medical service officer, I completed both Airborne and Air Assault. I struggled to think of a single infantry officer who I’ve met that hasn’t completed at least one of the three – and I could only think of one.
Any junior officer that’s ever served in a BCT can tell you the #1 captain, if not in command, is the AS3. The lower performing folks are put in charge of made up shops – Civil Affairs being an ‘imaginary’ shop in most battalions. Our battalion’s S-9 was staffed by a never-going-to-get-promoted fat Captain and a SFC with DUI and EO problems. Speaking to former peers, that’s the general consensus – the folks in the ‘made up’ shops are the lowest performers. Why was LT/CPT Hegseth put in that position?
Then it appears that CPT Hegseth volunteered to be an instructor of some sort at the COIN academy in Kabul where he taught one class. Again, these classes are typically taught by post-command Captains/early Majors and Master Sergeants. Why would someone with no real experience in COIN be teaching COIN at a theater level? Why would a Captain be working at theater-level if not to keep him out of trouble or because no one would pick him for their team?
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It's an 8 month old thread, but I found the thread reassuring re: how the Napolean wannabe is perceived among many in the military ranks. Truth be known, he's comparable only to the satirically defined Napolean, not the man Napolean Bonaparte actually was.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Military/comments/1jljfk2/whats_the_deal_with_pete_hegseth_am_i_the_only/
Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani's supposedly radical policies as 'normal'
Critics of New York City’s mayor-elect have said his pledges of free bus service and universal childcare are unrealistic, but in Europe it’s a given.
After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign. His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal childcare and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.
But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said the Dutch environmentalist and former government adviser Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election. Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo cafe, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.
“Normal. That’s the word,” Verbeek wrote in his newsletter, The Planet. “Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.”
That view hit on the wide differences in how Mamdani’s promises are seen by many across the Atlantic. “Europeans recognize his vision about free public transit and universal childcare. We expect our governments to make these kinds of services accessible to all of us,” said Verbeek. “We pay higher taxes and get civilized societies in return. The debate here isn’t whether to have these programs, but how to improve them.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohran-mamdani-policies-normal
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Sure would be nice to know that all Democrats think of Mamdani's policy views as normal.
'We need to take back the flag': Why patriotic symbols were all over the 'No Kings' protests
House Speaker Mike Johnson and other top Republicans have called the “No Kings” protests that swept the country over the weekend “hate America” rallies. They might have felt differently if they’d visited the rotary at the intersection of West Roxbury Parkway and Centre Street on Saturday. Under a blue fall sky, more than 100 protesters ringed the roundabout holding signs and symbols associated with American patriotism. Some displayed messages like “Save the Constitution” or waved American flags. The story was similar elsewhere. In thousands of communities nationwide, protesters critical of President Trump and his actions carried signs like “Resistance is patriotic,” “Nothing is more American than opposing a tyrant,” and “I’m here because I love America.” They dressed up like the Statue of Liberty. They chanted “USA!” and sang “America the Beautiful.”
Using patriotic symbols is a tactical choice for protest movements, and some of the most successful ones in US history have. During the 1960s, civil rights activists carried American flags and quoted the country’s founding documents. The Tea Party protesters who pushed the Republican Party rightward during Barack Obama’s presidency dressed up in colonial garb and took their name from the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor. One reason protest movements adopt patriotic symbols is obvious: It associates their cause with the country’s core ideals. “He is destroying this document that our country was founded upon,” Hathaway Norman, a legal assistant standing by the rotary in West Roxbury, said of Trump while holding a sign that featured the US Constitution and an image of George Washington’s face.
For others, patriotic signs were an argument about which side’s values better align with the country’s founding ethos. “True America stands for free people and freedom of speech and freedom of religion,” said Megan Reilly Padilla, a public school teacher who held a handwritten poster that said “Defend Democracy” alongside her dog, Maple, whose collar bore a “Dogs for Democracy” sign. With that in mind, I asked Ralph Tisei, who stood by the rotary waving a medium-sized version of the Stars and Stripes, whether his protest emblem of choice had anything to do with Republican remarks associating No Kings with hating America. “That’s why I brought it,” he said. “We need to take back the flag,” said his sister Joanne, a retired Boston Public School teacher, adding that she’d recently hung one outside her house.
But overall, the No Kings marches have hewed toward patriotic symbols more than any other Trump-era protest so far, from the Women’s March to Black Lives Matter. Said Norman, the protester who carried a copy of the Constitution: “It’s important to all of us to remember that this is what we are all here for.”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/20/newsletters/starting-point-no-kings-boston/?p1=Article_Recirc_Most_Popular
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I agree completely.
Naked bike riders demonstrate against federal troops in 'quintessentially Portland' protest
[link:https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/2025/10/13/portland-emergency-world-naked-bike-ride-trump-photos/86671848007/l
Gotta love Portland!
Ordinarily, all of these folks would have been totally butt naked (oh, the horrors! right?
), but it was a bit, if not unseasonably cooler than normal here in western Oregon and very rainy yesterday.
More on the “Emergency World Naked Bike Ride” yesterday:
https://m.
https://apnews.com/article/portland-oregon-naked-bike-ride-protest-43ecafc5f5ce0a7d7f44dc016fbe86d0
Live stream of ICE Building and surrounding area in Portland OR
available starting midnight tonight — for anyone wishing to see/view the war zone or send the link to others — like the White House, Kristi Noem, your MAGA siblings or cousins, etc.
https://katu.com/news/local/24-hours-outside-ice-what-really-going-on-portland-oregon-trump-administration-local-republicans-immigration-protest-antifa-fascism-national-guard-kotek-police-crime-media-noem-kristi-dhs
Live stream of ICE Building and surrounding area in Portland OR
available starting midnight tonight — for anyone wishing to see/view the war zone or send the link to others — like the White House, Kristi Noem, your MAGA siblings or cousins, etc.
https://katu.com/news/local/24-hours-outside-ice-what-really-going-on-portland-oregon-trump-administration-local-republicans-immigration-protest-antifa-fascism-national-guard-kotek-police-crime-media-noem-kristi-dhs
This Maine oysterman thinks Democrats are doing 'jack' about fascism. So he's running for US Senate
One of Graham Platner’s high school yearbooks shows him babyfaced with a buzzcut, holding a sign proclaiming, in part: “Free Palestine.” The image is accompanied by a superlative his classmates bestowed upon him: “Most Likely To Start A Revolution.”
“We'll see!” Platner wrote on X Thursday, posting a photo of the yearbook page, in a post that’s been viewed 4.5m times. Now bearded, burly and tattooed, with a sweep of dirty blond hair above a sunburnt face, Platner still believes in a free Palestine. He also thinks it’ll take something revolutionary to save the US, so earlier this week, when the oysterman announced his candidacy to be the next US senator from Maine, he pulled no punches.
“I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps and the army. I’m not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it, the politicians who sell us out,” he said in a campaign launch video, showing him chopping wood and at the helm of a small fishing boat. “And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins. I’m not fooled by this fake charade of Collins’ deliberations and moderation.”
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Platner believes the party needs an outsider. He believes that pedigreed, establishment Democratic candidates have failed repeatedly to appeal to working-class Americans, hastening the rise of Maga. “This isn’t a vanity project,” Platner says of his Senate campaign. If anything, he says, the campaign has thrown his life into “a bit of disarray”. He’s doing it because he cares about the community that has cared for him and believes in a type of politics that may have appeal across the political spectrum – one he believes has the ability to stop the rising tide of fascism in the US.
His policy proposals – Medicare for all, the return of “serious federal support for building housing” and a “billionaire minimum tax”, among others – may not sound too dissimilar from the platforms of progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders. But Platner is wary of labels, eschewing words like “liberal” or “leftie”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/24/graham-platner-maine-senate-oysterman
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More at the link above. I like what this guy has to say and how he says it. He kind of speaks my mind.
Forty-five or so years later, Ronald Reagan is finally right ...
the federal government is the problem. That’s all.
Union leaders' exit from DNC exposes 'mind-boggling' tensions inside Democratic party
Opinion piece in The Guardian this morning.
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Randi Weingarten and Lee Saunders quit the Democratic National Committee, saying it isn’t doing enough to “open the gates” and win back the support of working-class voters. Ken Martin, the new DNC chair, and his allies told the Guardian that the party was focused on doing exactly that.
Weingarten, president of the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers, resigned after Martin did not renominate her to serve on the DNC’s important rules committee. In her resignation letter, Weingarten wrote that education, healthcare and public service workers were in “an existential battle” due to Donald Trump’s attacks and that she did not “want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent”.
Saunders, the long-time president of the 1.3-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, also issued a critical statement. “These are new times. They deserve new strategies,” he said. “We must evolve to meet the urgency of the moment. This is not a time to close ranks or turn inward … It is our responsibility to open the gates [and] welcome others.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/25/dnc-union-leaders-democratic-party
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Much more in the article.
What if we didn't suck?': the leftist influencer who wants to campaign for Congress differently
Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old progressive TikTok star, wants to do campaigns differently. So the very online candidate for a solid blue congressional seat in Illinois is channeling her energy into in-person events.
The entry fee for her campaign’s kick-off event was a box of tampons or pads to be donated to The Period Collective, a Chicago-based non-profit that distributes free menstrual products to low-income communities in the area. The debut was such a success, she said, they filled her campaign manager’s SUV with donations. (“I want him to get pulled over so bad,” Abughazaleh quipped in a video for her YouTube series How to Run for Congress.) It’s part of her pledge to disrupt politics as usual and run a campaign centered on mutual aid and community organizing instead of a candidate-centered “vanity project” that relies on expensive TV ads and “grifty” fundraising texts.
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In the week after Abughazaleh launched her campaign, she said it had raised more than $300,000 and received more than 1,000 volunteer sign-ups.
“I am sick of waiting around for someone to do something,” she said, speaking via videoconference from her apartment in Chicago, where she has a set-up for recordings and interviews. “There is no mythical, perfect candidate that’s coming out of the woodwork to save us.”
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Illinois’s ninth district, anchored in Chicago’s North Side and stretching west, is one of the most reliably blue congressional districts in the state and has been represented by Jan Schakowsky since 1999 – the year Abughazaleh was born. In the interview, Abughazaleh said her candidacy was not intended as a “referendum” on the 80-year-old Democrat who has not said yet whether she intends to seek re-election. Nor is it a leftwing challenge, she said, acknowledging Schakowsky’s progressive rec
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/08/influencer-congress-race-illinois
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Good to see. Much more in the article. I find this quite exciting and hope others will as well.
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Member since: Tue Mar 25, 2014, 12:18 PMNumber of posts: 17,102