Susan Tincher woke up early one day and received an alert about a disturbance in her neighborhood. She dressed, drove a few blocks, and got out of her car, where she encountered ICE. Within seconds, she was thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and taken away. This is her story.
Someone at the White House thinks cruelty is funny.
Merry Christmas!
Since my childhood, I have always thought of Christmas as a day of peace, holiness, and love.
It’s not a happy time for many families.
Robert Reich compares what is happening right now to the Nazi regimes’s treatment of Jews in the 1930s and America’s treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Its plan to warehouse immigrants has shades of Nazi concentration camps and America’s shameful imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
The Trump administration is building or refurbishing huge incarceration centers.
This is the beginning.
Who are we?
I’m confused. Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not send the National Guard to Chicago. Okay.
But a few minutes later, he mobilized the Louisiana National Guard and ordered it to New Orleans, where serious crime is declining. Jeff Landry, the Republican Governor of Louisiana, was delighted that Trump was sending in the Guard.
Questions:
If the president can’t send the Guard to Chicago, why can he send it to New Orleans?
If Governor Landry thought that New Orleans needed the National Guard, why didn’t he mobilize them himself? Maybe it’s because the federal government will pay part of the costs. But if the need was urgent, it seems the Governor would have acted without delay.
Answers?
These past few days, we have seen a perfect illustration of “the Streisand Effect.”
Perhaps you are among the few people in the nation who doesn’t know what that term refers to. I asked around and found friends who had never heard of it.
So as a public service, I’m posting the definition., relying on Wikipedia
In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued an aerial photographer and the company he worked for when she learned that her house in Malibu had been photographed as part of the California Coastal Records Project, to document coastal erosion. Her home was part of a collection of 12,000 photographs. She sued for $50 million for “invasion of property.” Before she sued, the image had been downloaded only six times; after she sued, it was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. A judge dismissed the case and required her to pay $177,000 to the folks she sued for their legal expenses.
The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
So here’s the Streisand Effect in action, before our very eyes. Bari Weiss, the new “editor-in-chief” at CBS News, saw the report called “Inside CECOT” that “60 Minutes” planned to air last Sunday. After careful review, the segment was heavily promoted as a coming attraction.
Then Bari Weiss decided to yank it.
Consequently, the story of censorship exploded and got far more attention than if the show had aired as planned. Bootleg copies of “Inside CECOT” are in many corners of the Internet, sent from Canada, where the show played before it was spiked.
If it had aired on schedule, there would have been no mention of it in every major news outlet.
Bari Weiss blew it up into a news story.
The Streisand Effect.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Jared Kushner and real estate developer-diplomat Steve Witkoff have developed plans for the reconstruction of Gaza as an elegant, luxurious resort.
The story, if you can open the WSJ, features drawings of a beachfront ringed by futuristic high-rise luxury buildings, harbors with yachts, a dreamscape replacing a devastated landscape. It’s reminiscent of the video released by the White House last year that showed Trump and Netanyahu stretched out on beach chairs on the Gaza beach, enjoying their drinks in the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The curious part of this fantasy is the claim that that this the cost will be $112 billion.
The presentationhas been shared with the leaders of oil-rich Arab nations.
The unsolved problem: what to do with the 2 million homeless Gazans.
WASHINGTON—Beachside luxury resorts. High-speed rail. AI-optimized smart grids.
Welcome to “Project Sunrise,” the Trump administration’s pitch to foreign governments and investors to turn Gaza’s rubble into a futuristic coastal destination.
A team led by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, two top White House aides, developed a draft proposal to convert the bombed-out enclave into a gleaming metropolis. In 32 pages of PowerPoint slides, replete with images of coastal high-rises alongside charts and cost tables, the plan outlines steps to take Gaza residents from tents to penthouses and from poverty to prosperity.
The presentation is labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” and doesn’t go into details about which countries or companies would fund Gaza’s rebuilding. Nor does it specify where precisely the 2 million displaced Palestinians would live during reconstruction. The U.S. has shown the slides to prospective donor countries, U.S. officials said, including wealthy Gulf kingdoms, Turkey and Egypt….
In looking around, trying to learn more about Sharyn Alfonsi, I came across a commencement address she delivered at the journalism school at the University of Mississippi. It is hilarious!
She offers an abundance of wit, mingled with great career advice for aspiring journalists.
You get insight into the character of the “60 Minutes” reporter who spoke out and stood up to her bosses when they censored her reporting about CECOT, the terrorist prison in El Salvador.
As Dan Rather said, Sharyn Alfonsi is “One Courageous Correspondent.”
Dan Rather, legendary newsman, spent decades at CBS. Now, in retirement, he continues to have good sources at the network. In his blog “Steady,” he explains the back story of the censorship of the “60 Minutes” expose of inhumane conditions at the prison in El Salvador to which the Trump administration sent alleged terrorists.
He titled this piece “One Courageous Correspondent.”
CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is walking the walk.
What she has done for journalism in the last two days is about as important, and courageous as it gets. With her cherished journalistic institution threatened, and her career on the line, Alfonsi is sounding the alarm that “60 Minutes” is sliding further into an increasingly irretrievable and dark place.
The Steady team spoke to sources inside the broadcast today to find out exactly what happened when the new CBS News boss, Bari Weiss, spiked a highly promoted piece at the last minute.
On background, we learned that Alfonsi and producer Oriana Zill de Granados had for months been working on a story about the Trump administration’s illegal deportations of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
They interviewed former inmates about the brutal and torturous conditions inside the notorious prison. This is the place where Trump sent hundreds of Venezuelans he alleged were terrorists with gang ties. Human Rights Watch found that the 252 men were subject to “arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance.”
As part of the reporting, they repeatedly asked the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department for comment, but received no response. That is no surprise since this story would be another black mark on Trump’s draconian immigration agenda.
Last Thursday, after the story had been fully fact-checked and legally vetted by CBS lawyers and its Standards and Practices team, the piece was screened for a fifth and final time for CBS News executives. Weiss was supposed to attend but did not.
She did, however, screen the story several hours later. At 11:50 p.m. Thursday, Weiss emailed the broadcast’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, outlining a few issues she had with the piece that she called “incredibly powerful.”
On Friday morning, Alfonsi made several changes to the script to address Weiss’s concerns, believed it was ready for air, and recorded her in-studio introduction
The listing of Sunday night’s “60 Minutes” pieces was released, which included Alfonsi’s “Inside CECOT.” Promos began to air, including on social media. The “Inside CECOT” clip on Instagram quickly racked up 4 million views, significantly more than usual.
But by Saturday morning, something changed. In an unprecedented move, Weiss reached out to Simon again. Her biggest issue now was the lack of response from the Trump administration. It was the first time she raised this concern.
“I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record,” Weiss wrote. She even provided phone numbers for Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, and border czar Tom Homan.
Not long after, Weiss killed the story, though promos kept running and the piece was still listed as airing.
Late on Sunday afternoon, just three hours before air time, “60 Minutes” posted an editor’s note on social media: “The broadcast lineup for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been updated. Our report ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future broadcast.”
Within two hours, Alfonsi sent an email to her fellow correspondents and the production team that worked on the piece. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now — after every rigorous internal check has been met — is not an editorial decision, it is a political one,” she wrote.
She continued, “Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.”
Alfonsi then addressed Weiss’s issue with the administration’s decision not to respond. “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”
Alfonsi is the definition of courage. Kudos to her for speaking truth to power. The hard-won reputation of America’s most trusted television news program, and a big-time money maker for Paramount, is suddenly on the line.
During the CBS News morning editorial call on Monday, Weiss defended her decision. “I held a ‘60 Minutes’ story because it was not ready… We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.”
Nothing happens in a vacuum in Trump World. The killing of the CECOT piece is no exception.
In August, David Ellison, the scion of Oracle founder and Trump supporter Larry Ellison, purchased CBS parent company Paramount. The acquisition by Ellison’s Skydance needed administration approval, which Trump’s regulators signed off on to the deep-pocketed Ellisons.
They signed off only after CBS agreed to settle a specious lawsuit in which Trump accused the network of deceitfully editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign.
As per usual, Trump’s warm and fuzzy feelings toward his sycophants was fleeting.
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before,” Trump posted on social media last week.
Friday night, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump said, “I love the new owners of CBS. Something happens to them, though. ‘60 Minutes’ has treated me worse under the new ownership… they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.”
How Trump feels about the Ellisons is especially important right now as Paramount Skydance attempts a hostile takeover of another media giant, Warner Bros. Discovery. And once again, the Ellisons, who have been major donors to Trump, need governmental approval.
The president’s hatred of the revered news magazine seems to have been rekindled by a recent Lesley Stahl interview with the president’s newest nemesis, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Right after that interview aired, he posted, “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP. Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!”
Not coincidentally, “Bari Weiss got personally involved,” with stories about politics after the Greene interview, a “60 Minutes” insider told CNN.
This brings us back to Alfonsi’s piece, which had the unfortunate luck of being scheduled to air the evening before David Ellison upped his bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Staying in Trump’s good graces is, well, paramount at the moment.
The day Skydance bought Paramount was a dark day for CBS News and journalism as a whole. When Weiss, with no television reporting or news production experience, was installed as CBS News editor-in-chief, my heart sank again.
If the Trump administration doesn’t want to comment, they won’t, and didn’t. It happens dozens of times a day, every day to every journalist trying to cover this facts-adverse administration. No amount of wishing, or asking, or begging will make it happen. Weiss’s knee-jerk reaction was just an excuse.
The day has been filled with talk of journalists walking away from “60 Minutes.” As one insider told us, we have got nothing left but our integrity.
What happened to Alfonsi’s piece is no less hard to take even though anyone could see it coming. The barbarians are no longer at the gate. They have breached the walls and are now running the show.
www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-capital-flow-trump/
This is a gift article that appeared in Bloomberg News. It describes the dramatic changes that Trump has made by executive order to redirect the flow of money.
It’s unlikely that Trump wrote these orders or even understood their implications. He is surrounded by people who know precisely what they are doing: windfalls for the rich.
Andy Spears, veteran journalist based in Tennessee, writes about “reformers” plan to undermine and disrupt public schools in Indianapolis.
Indianapolis appears to be the latest front in the ongoing battle to “disrupt” public education so much that it doesn’t exist anymore.
WFYI reports on a new governing body created to “bridge” the provision of services between Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) and the city’s charter school sector.
In an 8-1 decision Wednesday evening, the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance recommended establishing the nine-member corporation. If approved by state lawmakers, this new agency called the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, would act as a logistical bridge between the district and charter schools, managing unified busing, enrollment, and facility use.
While the IPS School Board will remain intact, the new agency will have significant authority to manage interactions between the Board and charter schools.
Some see this as the beginning of creating an unaccountable agency to further advance school privatization in the district.
During public comment, many spoke out against taking any power away from the IPS Board. Some suggested the board should oversee the transportation needs of charter schools. And others painted the ILEA members’ process as undemocratic.
WFYI explains how charter schools work in Indiana:
Charter schools are tuition-free public schools managed privately by nonprofit boards rather than elected officials. These boards operate under contracts granted by one of several authorizers in the state.
A parent representative on the group that reviewed proposals and recommended the new governing agency expressed skepticism:
The recommendation also drew sharp criticism for lacking specifics. Tina Ahlgren, the appointee representing district-managed school parents, cast the sole vote against it.
“I find my biggest reason to vote no is the level of ambiguity in the plan,” Ahlgren said. “I find these recommendations falling into this bizarre zone of simultaneously feeling both too much and not enough, bold in some areas but overly timid in others, with vague promises that the ecosystem will sort itself out.”
The proposal must now be approved by the Indiana General Assembly.
The Indianapolis move comes at a time when national forces are seeking full privatization of public schools, with some in the Trump Administration’s education leadership suggesting public education should all but end within 5-6 years.
In states like Tennessee, advocacy groups are launching efforts to disrupt public education so much it is effectively a thing of the past.
·And, Indiana is not without its own challenges in maintaining a functioning system of public schools alongside a range of private options.
The Indianapolis Star reports:
Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Programallows families to use state dollars that would have followed their child to a traditional public school to instead pay for a private, parochial or nonreligious school.
The state releases this report annually, and for the 2024-25 school year, it showed that the state spent around $497 million on the program, which is an increase of just over $58 million from the previous school year.
Just a few years ago – in 2017 – the Indiana school voucher scheme cost the state $54 million. Now, the year-over-year increase in voucher expenses exceeds what the entire program cost just 8 years ago.
Diane Ravitch's blog 