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Stunning Poll: Half Of Military Ready To Quit Over Trump And Hegseth

On Monday, a shocking new report revealed that half of U.S. armed forces service members want to quit because of the policies and poor leadership of President Donald Trump and his officials. Experts warn that the situation has become a full-blown “readiness crisis” that reduces the country’s military capabilities.

According to Military.com, a poll conducted by Common Defense “found that 53 percent of active-duty service members want to separate from service sooner because they said the military is becoming more politicized.” The survey revealed that 45 percent of service members are considering quitting specifically because of policy changes and uncertainty under the Trump administration, and that “67 percent agree that decisions affecting service members are being made for political gain, not mission readiness, compared to 25 percent who disagreed.” These findings come amid Trump’s ongoing conflict with Iran, and as the president considers resuming an all-out war following this week’s midterm elections.

"Veterans know what real leadership looks like: you take care of the people under your command and you keep politics out of the mission," said Jose Vasquez, U.S. Army veteran and executive director of Common Defense. "Right now, nearly 8-in-10 veterans and military families say they're being left behind, and active-duty troops are telling us that politicization is pushing them toward the exit. That's not a talking point; it's a readiness crisis.”

And service members have not been shy about admitting which leaders they blame. According to the poll, “Roughly 50 percent of veterans and active-duty service members said they disapproved of Trump as commander-in-chief, while 47 percent said they approved of him. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had a similar approval rating. Roughly 45 percent of respondents said they approved of him, while 50 percent said they disapproved. Another 56 percent said they approved of senior uniformed military commanders, such as top generals and admirals, while 27 percent said they disapproved.”

Over the course of the past two years, Hegseth has been responsible for major military shakeups, prioritizing emphasis on culture war issues while ousting top generals and other leaders with a lifetime of service under their belts. Last week brought another example, when Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia, a highly regarded officer and combat veteran, was fired from his position as Joint Staff Director of Strategy over leaking accusations.

According to the New York Times, “The general’s dismissal shocked and angered many current and retired senior Army officers. They described him as a loyal officer who had served bravely in combat and thought deeply about how the military needed to adapt and embrace new technology to fight future wars.”

As the Times notes, “Hegseth has dismissed or sidelined more than 80 generals and admirals, or about 10 percent of the force. In most cases those officers were fired without being told the reason.” At the same time, reporting has revealed that under Trump and Hegseth’s leadership, the military’s ability to respond to threats has been greatly diminished by depleted munition stockpiles and other failings, while the war in Iran has spiraled into a disaster of historic proportions.

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

Rejecting Donald Trump's Corruption Means Defeating Crooked Ken Paxton

As millions of Texas voters cast their ballots in an election that could determine control of the United States Senate, the rest of us can only hope they have gleaned the single most salient fact about Republican nominee Ken Paxton. As Texas attorney general, Paxton is technically the state's top law enforcement officer. And he is also an unrepentant racketeer, whose nomination epitomizes the Republican capitulation to Trump's monumental sleaze.

For voters in red Texas to reject Paxton would crystallize the popular revulsion against the theft of our government and treasure.

Many of Paxton's offenses involve complex securities transactions, financial litigation and real estate foreclosures that are simply opaque to most people. The average Texas voter is assuredly aware of this "conservative Christian" husband's marital infidelities. Texans know how he used a donor's firm to conceal one of several affairs — a baroque tale that emerged during his 2023 impeachment by Republican state senators. Yet his betrayals of constituents, his oath of office, and the public trust go far deeper than those peccadilloes.

The Texas House of Representatives approved a resolution of impeachment that specified 20 offenses, ranging from misuse of state resources and abuse of office to accepting a series of bribes from a real estate investor named Nate Paul. Once regarded as a wunderkind developer in Austin, Paul became infamous during the impeachment trial for hiring a Paxton mistress, secretly renovating Paxton's home for free, and using burner phones and a fake Uber account to evade surveillance of his contacts with the attorney general.

The Republican majority acquitted Paxton despite plentiful evidence of his guilt presented at his state Senate trial, allowing him to continue in office and plot his path to higher office. The permanent damage to his reputation would not dissuade his ethically tarnished ally Donald Trump from helping him to snatch the Senate nomination from incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn earlier this year.

Facing Democrat James Talarico, a state legislator with no ethical blemish on his record, Paxton can safely assume that most voters have forgotten — or never knew — exactly what he did to draw the attention of the FBI, the state Senate and other investigators who examined his record for evidence of crimes. Indeed, the coverage of his trial in the state Senate never fully revealed the dimensions and victims of his misconduct.

Of all the charges brought against Paxton, perhaps the least understood involved his actions on behalf of Paul. A high-flying young investor who proclaimed his ambition to become "the first self-made real estate billionaire," Paul turned out to be a conman whose Austin-based empire began to crumble in 2019 amid a series of bankruptcies and a spectacular FBI raid on his office and home.

Federal prosecutors charged him with over a dozen counts of fraud and deception in swindling his real estate partners, an indictment that neatly coincided with Paxton's impeachment. (Paul ultimately escaped prison by pleading guilty to a single count of misrepresentation.)

From press accounts, it is unclear when Paxton first encountered Paul, but as the latter increasingly came under legal scrutiny, the attorney general used his authority to protect the high-flying investor — by launching his own investigations against Paul's adversaries, intervening in lawsuits that involved Paul, and directing his subordinates to aid Paul's attorneys with confidential information, including unredacted FBI files.

But the action that epitomized Paxton's corrupt relationship with Paul concerned the investor's attempt to evade payment of a multimillion-dollar loan from a business development company known as Princeton Capital. About $50 million had been transferred under dubious circumstances from Capital Point, a limited partnership vehicle that had amassed millions of dollars in investment from public employee pension funds, including the Austin Police Retirement System as well as first responder funds in Little Rock, Seattle, Detroit, and several other municipalities.

The details of the creation of Princeton Capital and its agglomeration of those public pension assets is a classic American tale of political pay-for-play. The narrative recalls the public finance escapades of George W. Bush and his cronies that I examined in Harper's magazine in 1999. Regardless of the current enmity between the Bush and Paxton factions in the Texas GOP, they have always played this lucrative game much the same way.

When the Capital Point limited partners learned how their money had been secretly moved to Princeton Capital, they exercised fiduciary power to remove the discredited management — which had made the loans to Paul — and sought to recover that money. The loan to Paul became embroiled in litigation as the public pension funds sought to recover their absconded capital.

Paul's capacities as a fraudster were tested as he used shell companies and false filings to evade multiple state court orders to pay back the loan, which persisted long after the limited partners won a $10 million judgment against him. Finally, the court appointed a Texas attorney named Seth Kretzer to seize and auction Paul's hidden properties in order to satisfy the judgments against him.

As the state's top law enforcement official and a self-proclaimed advocate for "law and order," Paxton might have been expected to intervene in this case, if at all, on behalf of the police and firefighters whose pensions were at risk. But the Texas attorney general felt no such imperative. Having been paid off by Paul, he made no effort whatsoever to safeguard the cops' pensions in the Austin Police Retirement System, or those of the other first responders across the country, as this exceedingly complex series of lawsuits wound through the Texas court system.

Instead, Paxton shockingly intervened to hinder Kretzer from liquidating Paul's assets and restoring that money to the first responder pension funds. As later reported by whistleblowers in his office, the attorney general came up with a creative scheme to forestall the sale of Paul properties.

Early on the morning of August 1, 2020, two days before a scheduled auction of foreclosed Paul properties, Paxton's office issued an opinion declaring that outdoor building foreclosure sales could not be held lawfully under COVID-19 restrictions on public gatherings. As his top deputies and aides testified three years later during his impeachment trial, Paxton ignored normal procedures to rush the opinion out.

It was probably not a coincidence that on Oct. 29, 2018, the date when Princeton Capital's limited partners sent a notice of loan default to Paul, the investor had sent a check for $25,000 to Paxton's reelection campaign. Or that Paul then found so many ways to underwrite the personal grifting and extramarital sprees that are the essence of this Texas politician.

Paxton chose to "serve and protect" the crooks, not the cops.

For anyone hoping that a new Congress will hold Trump and his Cabinet accountable next year for their acts of massive and brazen corruption, nothing could be more repellent than the prospect of Sen. Ken Paxton.

Former DHS Official Warns: A Big Blue Wave Is 'Only Hope' To Stop Trump Coup

On Friday, a leaker from President Donald Trump’s first term laid out the details for the final phase of MAGA’s “dystopian” power grab. According to Miles Taylor — who served as deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security duringTrump’s first administration, when he famously revealed White House secrets — the president has spent the past two years attempting to take total control of the government, and if the midterm results leave him room, he’s going to finish the job.

“In January,” writes Taylor, “I posted a scorecard of the major warnings I’d made about a second Trump term. Ninety percent had already come true.” Taylor’s predictions were based on his experience in the Trump administration as well as interviews with other officials and Republicans. Now, he warns, if the GOP retains control of Congress, Trump will move to consolidate his power once and for all.

First, writes Taylor, “Trump will contest the results he doesn’t like. It’s already underway. His Justice Department has launched legal actions in states with competitive races and appears to have more on the way.” As Taylor notes, in recent weeks, the DOJ has issued grand jury subpoenas to California and Washington election officials in an effort to cancel 20,000 mail ballots from voters it calls noncitizens, a request a judge blocked.

“This could get much uglier,” warns Taylor, “with the FBI sent to seize ballots, chaos in the streets, and the use of emergency powers and legislative maneuvers to suppress the political opposition.” If he manages to muddle the election enough, Trump will keep his grip on the legislative branch.From there, he will ramp up his attempts to prosecute and jail critics. There have already been many such cases, notes Taylor, and next will be “governors, members of Congress, donors, organizers, protesters, and more.”

At the same time, Trump will “flout the courts. Last year, Trump menacingly warned reporters that he has a way to evade judicial scrutiny: by taking over. Specifically, as I’ve warned about for years, he’s fantasized about invoking the Insurrection Act and taking us close to martial law; if that happens, in his words, there will be ‘no more court cases, there is no more anything.’”

This will be accompanied by the permanent deployment of troops in the streets. The Supreme Court has already blocked early stages of this effort, but according to Taylor, should Trump eliminate the final constitutional check on his power, “by the summer of 2027, I expect soldiers policing major American cities.”

To ensure his control goes unchallenged, Taylor predicts that Trump will then “rewrite the rules of who gets to vote. The House has already passed the SAVE Act, which would end online and mail registration for millions. Though it stalled in the Senate, Trump will manage to secure its passage if power doesn’t change hands in Congress. The Supreme Court has already let DHS hand states an expanded citizenship database to scrub their voter rolls, and his blocked mail-ballot orders become law the moment a compliant Congress passes them. Make no mistake: this will result in the president having the de facto ability to create voting ‘blacklists' and wielding extraordinary power over federal elections.”

At the same time, “he will seek to finish off the free press,” allowing him to act without scrutiny, and complete his takeover of the Federal Reserve, allowing him to “detonate the economy” through his unchecked manipulation.

Finally, “he will refuse to leave.” As Taylor notes, Trump and his allies have not been secretive about their desire for him to continue ruling beyond his second term, and no one should be surprised if “he won’t surrender power” willingly. And because of all of this, warns Taylor, “The 2028 election will not be certifiable. With the aforementioned crackdown, Trump will be able to make sure the voter rolls are favorably purged, mail-in voting is gutted, election officials are afraid of prosecution, troops are ready to suppress the vote in opposition cities, a compliant Fed is goosing the economy, and a threatened press is more docile. Whatever happens in that vote, there will be no legitimate way to certify it, and no independent institution left with the ability to review it. Accordingly, the constitutional order will face the prospect of total collapse; indeed, a democracy whose processes are no longer democratic stops being one.”

Voting the GOP out during the midterms, argues Taylor – who, notably, has served in multiple Republican administrations – is the only hope of staving all of this off. As he concludes, “Forestalling such a dystopian future depends on a Congress willing to act. An overwhelming election result will tell Trump that the multitudes have turned against him. He and his officials will be made to fear the prospect of investigations, accountability, and justice, and while this won’t stop the man entirely, it will rein in his power considerably.”

Obama Laughs At Trump's 'Cheesecake Factory' Hysteria (And So Will You)

Campaigning for Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms in Atlanta on Wednesday night, former President Barack Obama had a jolly good time at the GOP’s expense.

I heard the president was not happy when I joked over the weekend that he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.

And listen … First of all, let me get this on the record—I am the father of two daughters. Do you think I could’ve survived their childhood without going to the Cheesecake Factory? I lived at Chuck E. Cheese, and California Pizza Kitchen, and the Cheesecake Factory. That was my jam for about a decade.

Of course the real problem is prices gotten so high, a lot of folks can barely afford to go out to eat. So you would think this administration would be spending time worrying about that. But that was the interesting thing about how the administration responded to the speech I gave the other day.

They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices. They did not argue with that. They did not deny tariffs were contributing to higher costs for families, they didn’t say anything about that.

I accused this administration, based on the facts, that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. They didn’t say anything about that. The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him!

But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the artisans in the White House.

And they mobilized—this was, I mean it’s all crazy, but this is the really crazy part—they mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke.

Not to inflation, but to that joke!

The White House even called the secretary of the treasury. This is the man who is in charge of the economy, the person who is supposed to be figuring out how to make your life more affordable. The guy who is supposed to be figuring out how to lower inflation and reduce interest rates. They told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory.

You all didn’t see this? This really happened.

And the treasury secretary, he happens to be a former hedge fund manager worth half a billion dollars, and he was out there in front of the Cheesecake Factory explaining how he ordered the delicious French dip cheeseburger, instead of the egg rolls.

Look, this is not something I ever thought of. I inherited this major financial crisis, I never called my treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, and said man you gotta go to Arby’s, order roast beef—no cheese, that may look elitist.

To everybody out there, including the press, I want you to understand this. This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems. So they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory. That’s the game they’ve been playing for the last two years.

Just keep throwing distractions out there—attacks, fabrications, phony outrage—and hope that you won’t notice that your bills are higher and your life is tougher. Except that okey-doke will not work this time Atlanta, because you know your prices are still up, because you pay your utility bills, you’ve seen what those are like. You know it’s still hard to pay rent, and pay for child care, and pay for health insurance.

And you know we need serious people who are listening to your concerns, who see you and care about you and have real plans to make your life better—people like Jon Ossoff, people like Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Uh oh, he said “umbrage.” Maybe we’ll get another three-day news cycle about how elitist that word is!

What’s particularly fun about that riff is that he’s laughing his ass off through it. It really is the dumbest thing possible, and it’s fun to see him laughing in the face of all those conservatives and their performative, insincere outrage.

And God I loved this:

He is legitimately funny:

And this, oh this …

I did a review of the Obama presidential museum a few months ago, and I noted how people walking past an exhibit of Michelle Obama’s dresses were asking, “Where is Obama’s tan suit?” Turns out, he gave it away a long time ago, and it still breaks my heart. I bet it would be a top-three attraction at the museum! And it warms my heart to see Obama laughing about it now.

Our side is truly more fun. It sucks that the dreary, dirge-like nihilism of the right resonates as well as it does with so many people. We need more joy in America.

And we certainly need more laughter in the face of right-wing idiocy.

Markos Moulitsas is founder and editor of the blogging website Daily Kos and author of three books.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Stunning Poll: Half Of Military Ready To Quit Over Trump And Hegseth

Rejecting Donald Trump's Corruption Means Defeating Crooked Ken Paxton

Former DHS Official Warns: A Big Blue Wave Is 'Only Hope' To Stop Trump Coup

Obama Laughs At Trump's 'Cheesecake Factory' Hysteria (And So Will You)

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