The US can afford two wars. We can afford 4 wars. The US could also afford universal healthcare, a job guarantee, end to poverty. The question of what we can afford is not a real one. The only question, and the only thing that matters, is what we prioritize.

Democracy demands citizen participation, and that means, as painful as it can be at times, we have to stay well-informed and well-educated. We must, to borrow a sports metaphor, keep our heads in the game. Be a smart voter and make ready for the New Year.

It’s also Pam Bondi’s failure to comply with deadlines, the incomplete production, and the heavily redacted releases, which seem to be offering protection to some of the powerful men who spent time with Jeffrey Epstein, which the Act explicitly prohibits.

A recent pardon for a nursing home executive, Joseph Schwartz, occurred after his mother attended a $1 million-per-person Trump fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. Schwartz had been convicted of defrauding workers and was granted clemency on November 14, 2025.

This includes investigations, prosecutions, flight logs, travel records, communications about criminal activities, immunity agreements, and documentation of his detention and death.

That mandatory deadline was December 19, 2025, and the Justice Department violated federal law.

This DOJ is led by an AG who represented Trump when he was impeached and a Deputy AG who was his personal criminal defense lawyer. Many of the U.S. Attorneys bear strong personal loyalty to Trump. It’s unprecedented, but that doesn’t mean we can’t label an outrage as an outrage

This sort of boost on the official Justice Department account, and it’s an outrage (and another marker of authoritarianism) that this president does. The Justice Department doesn’t represent the president, or at least it isn’t supposed to.