that's Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Pete Hegseth Reflects On His Confirmation Hearing"
Trump sued the Register, Gannett, and pollster Ann Selzer on Monday, alleging they had violated the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act by releasing a poll days before the November election that significantly understated his support. The poll showed Vice President Kamala Harris with a 3-point lead over Trump in Iowa. Trump went on to win the state by 13 points, and alleges the poll was fraudulent and an attempt at election interference.
let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'
Tuesday, January 14, 2025 This morning, the supremely unqualified Pete Hegseth is scheduled to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee to make the case that anyone -- any crazy, drunken loon -- can be the US Secretary of Defense.
- Paperwork delays meant the background checks and other materials for top Trump nominees were given to lawmakers late. Democrats have pushed for the reports to be available to all members before the hearings.
- Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the panel's top Democrat, met with Hegseth last week. Reed said the meeting did not relieve his concerns about Hegseth's nomination.
- Hegseth's hearing is the party's first shot to carry out the demands handed down by Schumer — skewer Trump's nominees and the MAGA brand.
Zoom in: The background report on Hegseth is particularly important given allegations of sexual assault and financial mismanagement of a nonprofit group.
- Republican senators at the time said the allegations were concerning and wanted more details about the complaints.
- Hegseth has denied wrongdoing.
Tom Boggioni (RAW STORY) reports:
Multiple Democratic senators are pointing with alarm at what they believe are gaps in information provided by the FBI on one of Donald Trump's most controversial Cabinet nominees.
According to a report from the New York Times, the slim information provided on Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, chosen to be the president-elect's secretary of defense, does not include examinations of information they have been provided directly.
Hegseth is facing a slew of questions over accusations of sexual assault, excessive drinking and financial improprieties while heading up several veterans organizations.
According to the Times, with Hegseth scheduled for a confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Democrats are questioning whether the nominee has received enough scrutiny in the short time allowed.
The Times is reporting, "several Democrats on the panel expressed concerns that they might not have relevant information for Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday," adding, "Democrats on the committee believe there are additional allegations that should appear in the pages of an F.B.I. background check, to inform their questioning. That belief is based in part on information they have gleaned from individuals who have quietly approached Senate offices to divulge information about Mr. Hegseth."
Some opinions? At NEWSWEEK, Greg Kelly offers:
Pete Hegseth, President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, revealed his vulnerability to blackmail in a single damning statement. Asked by Megyn Kelly why he paid money to a woman accusing him of sexual assault, Hegseth responded, "I paid her because I had to—or at least I thought I did at the time. I had a great job at Fox and a wonderful marriage... It is not what I should have done, but I did it to protect that. I did it to protect my wife, I did it to protect my family, and I did it to protect my job. It was a negotiation purely to try to prevent that."
This is the essence of blackmail: coercion through exploitation. It's a dark and dangerous reality. And it disqualifies Hegseth from leading the Pentagon—or any national security role under longstanding federal policy.
National security regulations have been clear for decades: Individuals susceptible to coercion cannot hold sensitive positions. Executive Order 10450, signed in 1953 and still in effect, explicitly bars individuals with vulnerabilities—such as blackmail—from positions of national security. This principle is reinforced by Standard Form 86, the mandatory questionnaire for all national security roles, which screens for "vulnerability to exploitation and coercion."
Hegseth's admission aligns directly with these disqualifiers. He has already demonstrated a willingness to pay off his accuser, allegedly to protect his personal and professional life. As Secretary of Defense, his responsibilities would be infinitely more critical, and his adversaries exponentially more dangerous.
Christian Whiton (NATIONAL INTEREST) offers:
There is much talk about experience, considering he can boast so little. He has never supervised or run an organization of any magnitude or complexity like that of the Defense Department. He has never reformed an obstinate organization, and this obstinate Pentagon has been in desperate need of change since the Cold War ended thirty years ago. It has lost the ability to win wars and is still configured for a Europe-first foreign policy with counterinsurgency and nation-building as side hustles. It needs a radical transformation to deter war with China. Hegseth is neither a leader of leaders, a deal guy, or even a simple manager. His garish choice of finery is another clue to his future performance. That may sound like a gratuitous comment, but appearances matter—man-boys with tough guy tats won’t move a culture that places exceptionally high value on what the military calls “command presence.”
The two people quoted above? Both conservatives. The first, a NEWSMAX host, the second served in Chump's first administration. Are you getting how wrong Pete Hegseth is?
Some Senate insiders, including Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), are blowing up Pete Hegseth's nomination for Secretary of Defense citing his lack of qualifications a day before the former Fox News host's confirmation hearings are set to begin.
Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large with The Intelligencer, quoted Kelly's devastating take on Hegseth in a column posted Monday.
Traister concluded, "Pete Hegseth is, by every measure, an abysmal nominee to run the American military. The Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News commentator has no experience managing enormous, complex organizations like the Pentagon and would, as secretary of Defense, be in charge of an $850 billion budget and 3 million active-duty and civilian personnel."
Traister then broke down the controversies plaguing Hegseth.
She wrote, "His spotty professional record includes having been asked to step down from two nonprofit veterans’ groups whose budgets he reportedly ran into the ground. Questions about his personal behavior abound: He has been accused of rape (he reached a civil settlement with his accuser in 2017) and has a reported habit of excessive drinking, including while on the job and to the point of incapacitation in public. He has defended waterboarding and torture, advocated on behalf of alleged war criminals, and as recently as November he declared, 'I’m straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles.' Even Republicans haven’t been able to find much good to say about him. 'If it were a secret ballot,' one moderate senator told me, 'I don’t think he’d be confirmed.'
On Monday, former Marine fighter pilot Lieutenant Colonel Amy McGrath, spoke to host Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) revealed that he and other officials had been denied access to the FBI file and financial documents outlining Pete Hegseth's history overseeing nonprofit organizations.
McGrath confessed that she couldn't understand why Republicans would try to hide the report from members of the Armed Services Committee or anyone else in the Senate who wanted to read it.
It is "the most consequential sequential position in the United States government. It is the largest agency in the United States government. As I mentioned, this is in the chain of command for nuclear weapons deployment," McGrath noted. "And the FBI report is going to talk about, you know, past personal conduct."
Leading the Pentagon is a job that will require "rapid minute-by-minute decisions on the deployment of nuclear weapons." She asked: "Do you want this man in the room? I mean, is he even going to be sober?"
Just when you think Pete Hegseth can't get more disgusting, he does. Brad Reed (RAW STORY) reports:
Trump Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has in the past raged against efforts to change the names of military bases named after Confederate generals — and has even floated bringing the old names back.
CNN reports that Hegseth just last year said that the government should change the name of Fort Liberty in North Carolina back to Fort Bragg during a podcast appearance in which he was promoting his book, "The War on Warriors."
The star Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin resigned from the paper Monday and took a parting shot at Jeff Bezos, its billionaire owner.
Driving her departure was recent executive decisions at the Post, she told CNN. That included its refusal to publish a satirical cartoon showing Bezos bending at the knee for Donald Trump and its blocking of a planned Kamala Harris endorsement last fall.
Rubin often pens columns from a conservative perspective but has been a staunch critic of the president-elect. She said Monday the Post has “failed spectacularly at a moment that we most need a robust, aggressive free press.”
Trump thought he and Republicans in Congress were all on the same page, But according to Punchbowl News on Monday, it turns out they aren't. And it came as a shock to the incoming president.
"Before the meetings at Mar-a-Lago, Trump was under the impression that the House GOP was in agreement on the one bill approach to reconciliation," Punchbowl News reporter Melanie Zanona posted on X. "He quickly learned that wasn’t the case ALSO — it’s looking increasingly likely that the debt ceiling will fall out of the bill."
“At the end of the day, President Trump is going to prefer, as he likes to say, 'one big, beautiful bill.' And there's a lot of merit to that, because we can put it all together, one big up-or-down vote, which can save the country, quite literally, because there are so many elements to it," the non-committal Johnson told Fox Business on Sunday.
In one week, the MAGA movement will make its triumphant return to the top echelon of power in Washington, with Donald Trump’s second inauguration as president. This time, he will lead a party and congressional contingent more thoroughly crafted in his image.
But that in and of itself has created problems, because the MAGA movement has always been a loosely stitched-together confederation led by a man with relatively few ideological convictions. It and he have always been much more animated by Trump the man than any particular set of ideals. And because Trump has proved so malleable, there is a premium on being the one in his ear.
That dynamic is already leading to a rash of infighting over who grabs that ear and guides both Trump and his base.
And the fight over what Trumpism means has gotten quite ugly quite quickly.
While previous battles were mostly between the old Republican establishment and MAGA, the new ones are largely between various sectors of the MAGA movement jostling for influence.
And because the tensions appear intractable and Trump has fostered such a combative movement, the clashes don’t appear likely to subside any time soon.
The most recent fight pits one of the most significant figures in Trump’s 2016 win, Stephen K. Bannon, against the face of Trump’s 2024 win, Elon Musk. Bannon has now thrown down the gauntlet and pledged to oust Musk from Trump’s orbit.
Bannon went so far last week as to tell Musk to “go back to South Africa,” where Musk was born and which Bannon said is home to “the most racist people on earth, White South Africans.” (Bannon also invoked other influential Trump advisers with ties to South Africa, David Sacks and Peter Thiel, in his comments.)
Beginning with his “Merry Christmas to all” tweet that he wanted to seize the Panama Canal, Canada and Greenland, Trump has not relented in his absurd claims, extended to renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. His disdain for the sovereignty of independent nations—two of them NATO allies and Panama a fellow member of the Organization of American States—has undermined the credibility of opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s ambition to grab Taiwan. The soft power of the U.S., ultimately based on its democratic example and respect for international order, has been tossed away by Trump’s fantasy Manifest Destiny that is simply the latest wrinkle in his isolationism. Hardly the Rough Rider, if Trump were acting as Putin’s or Xi’s agent he could not have kowtowed more for their benefit.
Some have suggested that Trump contrives his ludicrous claims as a distraction from his broken campaign promise to bring down prices that was the central basis for his election. “Inflation will vanish completely,” he pledged. Time and again, he stated: “We’re going to bring those prices way down.” Then, on December 12, he revealed that the core of his campaign was false all along. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he said. “You know, it’s very hard.” He also acknowledged that his tariffs could spike inflation. “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow.” Oh, and, in his one truthful statement: “Things do change.”
Donald Trump’s lobbyist friends are starting a nationwide campaign to convince the public that Republicans’ lopsided 2017 tax cuts—which benefited large corporations and the wealthy—should be renewed.
In a minute-long TV ad, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, described the Trump tax cuts as “a landmark law that gave hardworking Americans much-needed relief.” It then rattled off a list of statistics before blaming Bidenomics for inflation while scary music played.
AFP’s version of events goes against every piece of evidence that emerged after the tax cuts went into effect.
If the law is extended, households in the top 1 percent of income on average will receive tax cuts of more than $60,000, while households in the bottom 60 percent will get only $500, according to the Tax Policy Center.
“Wage growth is tepid … and gross domestic product growth is slowing and projected to revert to its long-term trend or below,” the Center for American Progress wrote in 2019. “Meanwhile, budget deficits are higher due to revenue losses—which have largely been triggered by the massive corporate tax cut at the heart of the TCJA [Trump’s tax cut bill].”
And yet AFP is committing to its own fictional story, even describing its Koch-funded initiative as “grassroots.” But not everyone is buying it.
A variety of adjectives come to mind when assessing congressional Republicans’ plans for the year, including some obvious descriptions such as “regressive” and “misguided.”
But just as notable is the degree to which the GOP agenda is expensive. Tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations aren’t going to pay for themselves — despite partisan claims to the contrary — and the party’s border policies similarly carry a hefty price tag.
With this in mind, the first question facing Republicans is whether to try to pay for their priorities. The answer might seem obvious given the fact that the GOP at least pretends to take fiscal responsibility seriously, but in recent decades, Republican administrations and their allies on Capitol Hill have generally been quite comfortable approving their policy goals and putting the costs on the national charge card, resulting in ballooning deficits and adding trillions of dollars to the national debt.
But if the party answers the first question by deciding to at least make an effort, a second question soon follows: How, exactly, will GOP officials pay for their plans? According to a Politico report, House Republicans are considering a “menu” that’s circulating on the Hill.
While the reporting hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Politico published a copy of the “menu” online.
The following sites updated:
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