Wonder why Islam calls us the Great Satan?

Maybe we are?

 

Good for Cuba, though

 

I'm sure Putin got word to Trump.

He can't defeat Iran

So he's turning to something where he had some success...

From Adam Klasfeld's All Rise News newsletter:

As Nicolás Maduro returns to court this week, multiple Latin American leaders appear to be in federal prosecutors’ sights.

Over in the Southern District of Florida, U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones has an open investigation into the Cuban government’s leadership, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times recently reported that federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn are investigating Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has been engaged in a protracted feud with Donald Trump. Petro has been one of the most outspoken critics of Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean, openly denouncing the targeting of the vessels as “murder.”

[...]

New scholarship based on declassified documents shows how Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr wrote the legal rationale for the operation to “snatch” [Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in 1990], providing the groundwork for the raid on Maduro — and perhaps, the White House’s next target.

[...]

One of the pillars of the Barr doctrine holds that U.S. presidents have “inherent constitutional authority” to execute arrests abroad “even if those actions contravene customary international law.”

[...]

The dusted off doctrine now meets a second-term Trump emboldened to use the Justice Department as an instrument of his personal interests, political agendas, and score settling.

With Trump openly angling for regime change in Cuba, the prosecutor investigating the country’s leadership is a reliable attack dog for the White House.

Good God

Lindsey is desperate to crawl up Trump's ass further than anyone else.  And the shit he's spewing here proves where he is.

Really.  Listen to the whole thing.

Disgusting.  And if the Dems can't make hay out of that, they are utterly useless.

Rabid insanity.

He doesn't hear himself because he's so far up Trump's ass his ears are clogged with shit.

That's because he's up Trump's ass full of shit.

Armageddon, baby!

JFC.  

We could do them all at the same time

 

Add Cuba to the nations Trump seeks to go to war against

 

We have tried to destroy Cuba for decades

It's disgraceful and inhumane.  

Cuba's turn

Stir the pot in every corner of the globe.  Wait for the explosion.

US attack on Venezuela - Day 2

 

Venezuela HAS a government.  The Trump administration is acting as if it doesn't.

Machado is the woman awarded last year's Nobel Peace Prize.  She was no doubt in support of Trump's illegal operation to kidnap Maduro.  She must be pretty offended that he publicly said she doesn't have the respect needed to govern.  (Not that she's interested in the job.)

If you're leaking to the New York Times or the Washington Post (or any other mainstream media outlet), you're leaking to the wrong people.

UPDATE 01/04/2026:  Give us your country.  Or else.

Well, she's in a pickle.  Venezuelans will not allow her to do that.

Putin is only asking for Ukraine.

He couldn't have done what he did without the support and assistance of Venezuela's opposition party, which probably thought THEY'D be in charge.  The Faustian bargain is alive in the person of Donald Trump as Satan.

That's the true Trump Derangement Syndrome.  It's a virus running rampant.

Greenland and Denmark are part of NATO.  Taking Greenland would be a little tricky, but I would not put it past the mad orange king to try.

Of all the places he's threatening, this one, which should be the easiest given Cuba's location, is the least likely to even be undertaken.  Cuba has Putin's backing.  Perhaps he'll make a deal with Putin, Cuba in exchange for Ukraine.*

How many soldiers do we have?   Are we just going to send Erik Prince's mercenaries to occupy foreign houses of government?

UPDATE 08:55 pm:

What excuse will Trump use to eliminate her?

Game on, I guess.

This cannot end well.

If  you think Venezuelans are going to lay down for a Trump takeover, watch "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

 

UPDATE 09:23 pm:

He's not going to break the Venezuelan people, either.  He has bitten off more than he can chew.  

*UPDATE 01/05/2026:  I see the deal was already made.  But not using Cuba.

Just us and Israel - joined at the arms (pun intended)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile in Cuba

Oh, this is a good look!

On the 2020 campaign trail, Biden had promised to make the kingdom a "pariah" over the journalist Jamal Khashoggi's murder, which the CIA said Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had likely ordered.

[...]

However, Biden and the White House have since softened on Saudi Arabia, a shift culminating with reports last week that Biden will visit Saudi Arabia in July.

[...]

The US banned Russian oil imports in February and subsequently pleaded with Saudi Arabia to pump more as prices started to rise at home. (Gas prices hit a high of $4.87 a gallon on Monday.)

However, the kingdom denied those requests and later said it was committed to production levels agreed with the oil-producers group OPEC+, with MBS reportedly ignoring Biden's phone calls about boosting production.

Since then, a stream of senior US officials have flown to Saudi Arabia for discussions about oil.

  MSN

And yet...

The Biden administration has made a final decision against inviting the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to a regional summit this week.

[...]

The US choice regarding the Summit of the Americas that President Joe Biden is hosting in Los Angeles is based on concerns about the lack of democracy and respect for human rights in the three countries.

  Yahoo

Unlike Saudi Arabia?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jesus Christ

The Biden administration announced new sanctions on Friday against Cuba’s National Revolutionary Police and its top two officials, as the US looks to increase pressure on the communist government following this month’s protests on the island.

The Police Nacional Revolcionaria and the agency’s director and deputy director, Oscar Callejas Valcarce and Eddie Sierra Arias, were targeted in the latest sanctions announced by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

[...]

The administration said it is considering a wide range of additional options in response to the protests, including providing internet access to Cubans, and has created a working group to review US remittance policy to ensure that more of the money that Cuban Americans send home makes it directly into the hands of their families without the government taking a cut. Biden added that more sanctions were in the offing.

   alJazeera

Sixty years of sanctions already haven't done anything but deprive Cuban citizens of decent lives.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Unequal application of the law

[An anti-Cuban government]  rally caused an hours-long closure on part of the Palmetto Expressway in Miami-Dade County. It was the sort of scene envisioned by a divisive Florida law that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) pushed amid last year’s wave of racial justice demonstrations. The legislation calls for protesters to be cited if they block traffic.

But no citations were given Tuesday, according to state and local law enforcement. Critics took issue with the lack of citations, saying the law is unclear or unevenly applied. DeSantis, who invoked the possibility of protesters shutting down a highway as he signed the bill into law, has been vocal in his support of rallies against the Cuban government. Asked about the Palmetto Expressway protests during a Tuesday roundtable with reporters, he said the recent demonstrations were “fundamentally different” than last summer’s protests that had inspired the law.

[...]

Critics of the law questioned DeSantis’s political aims when arguing that it didn’t apply to the people protesting the Cuban government. Exiles from the island are an integral voting bloc for the Republican Party in South Florida.

[...]

At the signing ceremony, the governor called the measure “the strongest anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country.”

“Just think about it, you’re driving home from work, and all of a sudden, you have people out there shutting down a highway, and we worked hard to make sure that didn’t happen in Florida,” said DeSantis, who described the 2020 protests as “really unprecedented disorder and rioting.” “They start to do that, [then] there needs to be swift penalties.”

[...]

The anti-rioting law, signed after protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, says a person is committing a riot if “he or she willfully participates in a violent public disturbance involving an assembly of three or more people.” The measure also increases the penalties for any violence, burglary, looting or property damage during protests. Under the law, anyone arrested on unlawful-assembly charges must be held without bail until a first appearance in court.

A person shall be cited for a pedestrian violation if they “willfully obstruct the free, convenient, and normal use of a public street, highway or road.”

[...]

The law was put to use this week in Tampa, when two men were arrested during protests against the Cuban government.

Julian Rodriguez-Rodriguez, 30, and Maikel Vasquez-Pico, 39, were among the protesters who blocked traffic at Dale Mabry Highway and Interstate 275 on Tuesday, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Records show the men, who were arrested on multiple charges, were being held in jail until their first appearance in court because of the “anti-rioting” law.

[...]

Bob White, the chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Florida, who opposed the bill because it could be used against conservative protesters, said the law signed by DeSantis “makes no distinction between the type of protest or the ideology behind the protest.”

If police or prosecutors wish to use the law to target these demonstrators, it is outside the hands of DeSantis and Republican lawmakers, he said.

  WaPo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Minority rule

The Cuban immigrant population in Florida has controlled the fate of Cuba for decades. 

While Biden ended or reversed a number of Trump-era policies upon taking office, including the U.S. exit from the Paris climate deal and the so-called Muslim travel ban, former President Obama's former vice president has kept in place Trump-era restrictions on Cuba following Obama's openings to the island nation.

The administration has said it's reviewing the country’s policy on Cuba and hasn’t publicly ruled out changes. But the retention of Trump's policies so far also follows deeply disappointing results for Democrats among Latino voters in Florida, where Cuban Americans are a vital voting bloc.

  The Hill

Did they vote for Obama?

Democrats’ troubles in Florida were put into stark relief in November when Trump carried the state for a second time, helped out by big gains in the Miami area, a traditional Democratic stronghold where roughly 7 in 10 residents are Latino. In 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won Miami-Dade County by nearly 30 percentage points, while Biden carried it last year by less than 8 points.

Trump’s better-than-expected performance in Miami-Dade came down to several factors. For one, he campaigned there for years and embraced Spanish-language outreach efforts. At the same time, Spanish-speaking voters in South Florida found themselves targeted by disinformation campaigns in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

And Cubans pay the price.

“You have to ask yourself: what do we get for going back to the pre-Trump approach to Cuba?” one Florida Democratic strategist said. “The answer is nothing. The Cuba issue doesn’t play anywhere in the country but Florida, and here I think it’s a liability to say ‘let’s normalize relations with Cuba.’ ”

“It’s not going to win you any votes, but it will lose you votes,” the strategist added. “I think this is kind of an admission of that.”

It's still wrong to punish Cuba.

Biden vowed on the campaign trail to reverse the Trump administration’s policies on Cuba, arguing that the former president’s hard-line stance had “done nothing to advance democracy and human rights” and had instead made the situation on the island worse.

But since taking office in January, neither Biden nor his administration has signaled a willingness to return to the Obama-era policies of detente. At a briefing in March, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that “a Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.”

[...]

In perhaps the clearest sign to date that Biden has no immediate plans to reverse his predecessor’s Cuba policy, the State Department renewed a determination made under the Trump administration that Cuba is “not cooperating fully with United States antiterrorism efforts.”

Such bullshit.

Nelson Diaz, the chair of the Miami-Dade Republican Party, said that any effort by the Biden administration to reverse Trump’s policies on Cuba would “prove to us that they are communist sympathizers or socialists.” By sticking to the line set by the Trump administration, Diaz said, Biden may be able ease the concerns of at least some Cuban Americans.

Cuban Americans are an even smaller minority than are Republicans in general, and yet, they're controlling our foreign policy with regards to Cuba. It's as ridiculous as it is wrong.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Cuba without Castro

Raúl Castro has confirmed that he is resigning as head of Cuba’s Communist party, ending an era of formal leadership by him and his brother Fidel Castro that began with the 1959 revolution.

[...]

He said he was retiring with the sense of having “fulfilled his mission and confident in the future of the fatherland”.

Castro did not say who he would endorse as his successor as first secretary of the Communist party. But he previously indicated that he favors yielding control to 60-year-old Miguel Díaz-Canel, who succeeded him as president in 2018 and is the standard bearer of a younger generation of loyalists who have been pushing an economic opening without touching Cuba’s one-party system.

[...]

In January, Diaz-Canel finally pulled the trigger on a plan approved two congresses ago to unify the island’s dual currency system, giving rise to fears of inflation. He also threw the doors open to a broader range of private enterprise – a category long banned or tightly restricted – permitting Cubans to legally operate many sorts of self-run businesses from their homes

[...]

The coronavirus pandemic, painful financial reforms and restrictions imposed by the Trump administration have battered the economy, which shrank 11% last year as a result of a collapse in tourism and remittances. Long food lines and shortages have brought back echoes of the “special period” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Discontent has been fueled by the spread of the internet and growing inequality.

Much of the debate inside Cuba is focused on the pace of reform, with many complaining that the so-called “historic generation” represented by Castro has been too slow to open the economy.

[...]

Fidel Castro, who led the revolution that drove dictator Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959, formally became head of the party in 1965, about four years after officially embracing socialism.

He quickly absorbed the old party under his control and was the country’s unquestioned leader until falling ill in 2006 and in 2008 handing over the presidency to his younger brother Raúl, who had fought alongside him during the revolution.

Raúl succeeded him as head of the party in 2011. Fidel Castro died in 2016.

  The Guardian

Remember those mysterious symptoms embassy staff in Cuba were suffering?

American officials in Cuba and China have experienced ‘Havana Syndrome’ : hearing strange sounds, then suffering dizziness, headaches and memory loss. A new report in New York Times suggests that the cause of the syndrome is being covered up by the State Department.

[...]

The incidents, first reported in Cuba in 2016, have been controversial from the start. Victims typically hear a burst of high-pitched, grating noise with no obvious source before suffering other symptoms. Other people in the same building do not experience either the sound or the other effects.

[...]

[E]xtensive brain scans of the victims found signs of injury, described as “a new syndrome….that resembles persistent concussion” in a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2018.

Such effects could not be produced by a sonic weapon, which cannot travel through walls or be localized in this way. But researchers suggested that a microwave device might be involved.

[...]

“A minuscule but rapid rise in tissue temperature, resulting from the absorption of pulsed microwave energy, creates a thermoelastic expansion of brain matter,” says James Lin, a professor emeritus of bioelectromagnetic engineering at the University of Illinois, who has been investigating the effect for decades.

[...]

[T]here have been attempts to weaponize the effect.

In the early 2000s, the Sierra Nevada Corporation developed a device called MEDUSA, or Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio, for the U.S. Navy. The aim was to generate a microwave auditory effect loud enough to cause severe discomfort and disperse crowds – a microwave scream inside your skull. The most significant development was a novel electronic antenna able to form a narrow beam and target a specific individual. MEDUSA never made it past the prototype stage, and Sierra Nevada have declined to comment on later developments.

[...]

In the same time period, the U.S. Marine Corps funded work on another non-lethal weapon called EPIC — Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control. This aimed to disable people inside a building through the walls using pulsed radio waves to influence tiny hairs in the vestibular system. These hairs give us our sense of balance and orientation; hitting then with a resonant frequency can make them vibrate, causing dizziness and loss of balance. EPIC was intended to prevent subjects from moving or even standing up, forcing them to give up without a fight.

[...]

However, the technology was not developed beyond this initial stages.

  Forbes

So they say. There was also, I recall hearing, interest in tuning microwaves to affect specific races of people.

Chinese researchers found that rats exposed to pulsed microwaves had difficulty in learning to negotiate a water maze for up to three days after exposure. The researchers believed this was due to damage to the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory. It is suggestive of the memory loss and mental impairment suffered by some of the victims in Cuba and China.

In 2015, scientists in Tokyo carried out their own tests on rats, using intense pulsed power to cause microwave-induced traumatic brain injury. When they examined the damage to brain tissue afterwards, they concluded that “microwave-induced neurotrauma shows the same pathological changes as blast traumatic brain injury.” In other words, it is possible to produce concussion inside the skull with microwave pulses, exactly as seen in Havana Syndrome.

[...]

In August, the National Academies of Sciences finished up the most thorough study to date of the likely causes of the incidents in Cuba and China. [...] However, the State Department is withholding the report.

Dr. David A. Relman, chairman of the National Academies of Sciences committee that examined the cases, told the New York Times that the situation was “immensely frustrating” and that he did not know why the State Department is refusing to share the report with Congress or the public.

One possibility is that the report might complicate relations with China if it indicates that a Chinese weapon caused some of the cases.

It would also raise questions of whether U.S. agencies possess similar technology and whether it has ever been used.

Count on it. Or we will be doing so. 

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Let's do this

Actually, for US elites, that's not a positive thing.  They prefer ignorant citizens.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.