On Our "Virtual Route 99" (Final Year-End Edition): As We Plan to Go Dark...Some Year-End #RandomThoughts For the Week

 

We Present a special edition of "Virtual Route 99" for our Weekly Perspectives Property as wee present a snapshot of #RandomThoughts, including thoughts from Marcus Arelius, Code of The West, and Van Gogh, as we continue our "Mad Dash To Year-End 2025" and look forward to the continued privilege to serve  and close out with year-end thoughts below courtesy Marc Cooper of the Coop Scoop and The Marshall Project as we look forward to the privilege to serve in 2026.   

Happy holidays!!

December 12-15, 2025

By Marc Cooper

The patient is technically dead. There’s still some brain activity being registered but his vital signs have crashed. Code Blue — call the crash cart!

Seven out of ten Americans reject his economic management. His UN-favorable rating is 65%. He’s suffering a major political defeat almost every day. If he were a gambler, Donald J. Trump would be scrounging casino floors looking for loose change.

He and his MAGA lemmings are getting whacked in every off-year election from coast to coast, with Democrats taking two governorships in the last few weeks. The Republicans lost the mayorship of Miami the other day for the first time in 30 years, an area where Trump just a year ago had a 20% favorability lead. Respected polling outfits say if an election were held today, Democrats would win 56% of the congressional votes leaving Republicans with 41%. While the current MAGA majority in the House is four seats, Republican officials are telling reporters off the record that Democrats could pick up 40 seats next November,

Some Republicans are wisely now thinking about the post-Trump future, and theirs, and we saw two days ago 21 GOP state legislators in blood-red Indiana cross over to vote with Democrats to block Trump’s requested rewriting of the electoral map. Trump’s proposed gerrymander also seems DOA in New Hampshire and a handful of other states.

Then there was the humiliating unanimous vote by both houses of Congress to release the totality of the Epstein files, highlighting Trump’s waning power over his legislative toadies. And as I write this some 90,000 photos from the Epstein estate have been released, and none are going to help Trump. And for a third time Trump’s DOJ failed to get an indictment against New York attorney General Trish James. When you get beaten three times by a ham sandwich you know you are in trouble.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. A Socialist was elected as Mayor of New York. Not that much of a surprise as a Politico–Public First poll revealed that about half of Americans are finding it hard to impossible to afford food, housing, and healthcare. Some 55% of them directly blame Trump. And two weeks from now he’s going to take another body blow when millions of Americans find themselves priced out of health care by a feckless Congress and a brain-damaged president who cut billions from health care to help pay for permanent tax breaks for the ultra-rich.

Get the heart transplant unit on call for that one.

The genius tacticians at the RNC concluded that recent disastrous election results owed to Trump not having his magical name on the ballot and a lack of his public appearances. His circus-like rallies that marked his first term have dwindled to a sparse trickle, no doubt owing to whatever his undisclosed diseases are as he has as much as rented a room at Walter Reed.

Their “solution” to this quandary was to first awaken him from one of his now routine doze-offs, dress up his swelling body in a new suit and roll him out on a gurney across the country to rile up the pro-MAGA masses who are getting a bit restive. That move went over like cotton candy in a diabetes clinic when he made the first of those planned appearances in Pennsylvania last Tuesday.

His 20-minute speech ballooned into an 80-minute incoherent ramble which mentioned “high prices” one or two times and then quickly descended into the usual turbulent cesspool of grievance, self-pity, attacks on transgenders, electric cars, Joe Biden, senseless anecdotes, complaints about the 2016 election and a head-spinning riff on how negative coverage of him by the MSM should be criminalized as “treason.”

Excuse my French, but he sounded just plain fuckin’ nuts. This followed a Sunday TV interview in which he graded his economy as “A+++++.”

The RNC yesterday quietly announced they were retooling his planned nationwide speaking tour and some other uninspiring surrogates would fill in, while Trump will now focus on a single issue in each coming appearance. That, of course, will be his craziness.

A month or so ago I wrote that his failing presidency, like that of all fading dictators, would resort to domestic repression and external war, the last refuges of all losers.

It wasn’t difficult to make that prediction, just too many prior historical examples. So here we are in a deepening crisis and just how are those two issues working out?

The ICE raids have become the ICE follies. There are no mass deportations. There are no mass roundups. There’s a deranged Border Patrol Chief, a sawed-off Gregory Bovino and a roving gang of 300 agents, roving from city to city for a couple of weeks at a time, scaring the piss out of as many as possible, beating up and gassing protesters in the streets, denying basic rights to a few dozen people here and there, inadvertently forcing local businesses to close down as their employees take cover, making sure sputtering Bovino gets his mug on TV and enough airtime to sound like a jacked-up Colonel Kurtz and then moving on to the next reality show set.

Meanwhile, ICE and the DHS Thug Feds are being met by authentic dug-in and growing resistance from locals who don’t like the Gestapo in their streets. It’s a heartless, pointless and frightening campaign but it’s also a LOSER. Its most important achievement has been to spark a three-sided war inside DHS with Patton impersonator Bovino, the wretched Ice Barbie and the punch-drunk thug Tom Homan fighting it out for the spotlight and command authority. I make no prediction how the follies will evolve but I will guarantee you it will not produce mass deportations and, politically, it will be a net loss for MAGA.

As to the National Guard, now three federal judges have ruled they have been illegally deployed by Trump since the summer.

Speaking of wars… I love the late-night crack making the rounds about that second drone that was fired on command of the Pentagon to blow up the wreckage of a small outboard boat and the two poor bastards clinging to it that had already been destroyed by an earlier missile. “A war crime? How can there be a war crime if there was no war.”

It’s a funny line. It’s also the most sane way to describe the whole Venezuela fuck-up. Please, please, please, do not waste your time trying to unravel the lies, deceptions, cover-ups and general bullshit as to who exactly gave the order for that second strike and what does it mean.

It’s like trying to sort out who exactly were the most humane batch of guards at which Nazi prison camp.

Don’t waste your time. The best way to understand the shoot-’em-up in Venezuela is to comprehend that the entire operation, the deployment of the most lethal squadron of the U.S. Navy, the threats against Venezuela, the deployment of 14,000 battle troops, the seizure of a mammoth oil tanker, the incineration of at least 22 small boats with limited range, the killing of more than 80 people on those boats — all of it, the whole kit and caboodle, is patently and blatantly illegal under U.S. law and it makes almost no difference if a few survivors were later killed. All the victims are equally dead.

These are not war crimes. These are pure and simple homicides, murders, if you prefer. Legal observers say the killings can also be charged as crimes against humanity. These massacres are being carried out with no attempt to achieve anything concrete except the glorification of Donald Trump as Emperor of the Americas.

Venezuela just doesn’t figure into the U.S. drug abuse problem. No intelligence has been released backing up the administration’s constantly changing rationales and lies. Nor can the Pentagon get its own stories straight, evoking the Great Credibility Gap of the Vietnam era.

Trump is moving in on Venezuela by the paper-thin authority he granted himself by declaring that Venezuelan narco-gangs are “combatants” in a “war” with the United States. There is zero predicate for that affirmation. Zero.

Congress has not been informed or consulted on this one-sided “war.” Trump has wiped his rear end with the War Powers Act which requires congressional approval for any sustained military action. The president hasn’t even made a “weaving” speech to the public explaining why we are on the brink of one more “forever war.”

You’d have to have been living on Earth Two to not get what this is about — I will use the hated phrase “regime change” — the Bush/Cheney-coined euphemism for overthrow of a foreign government; a euphemism shamelessly adopted and assimilated by an obedient press corps.

Trump wants to overthrow the government of Venezuela. Period.

There’s two ways of doing it. Cause enough internal pressure that Maduro resigns with or without a coup by the military. This would accomplish nothing as the succeeding regime would be run by the military which is just as corrupt and brutal as Maduro. BFD.

The other option is a U.S. land invasion of Venezuela which Trump has been mumbling about this week. Good luck on that one because there’s a much higher probability of it becoming a forever war than a cakewalk. And currently a grand total of 19% of Americans support such an invasion.

So, yes, there is good news in that repudiation of Trump is starting to groundswell domestically. There are definite cracks among the Republicans. Trump can barely hold it together. The Democrats will win the House a year from now.

That, however, leaves us another full three years of a mentally declining undiagnosed psychiatric patient in the White House who in his shriveling mind really thinks he will run again in 2028 and win. And, sorry to say, there is no easy way out of this.

We don’t have a parliamentary government that can yake down the regime with one vote. No, he is not going to be removed by another impeachment nor by the 25th Amendment because as nervous as the Republicans are getting, there will never be enough votes unless Trump starts shooting babies on the Senate floor. There will be no general strike as union density is at an all-time low.

For those of you dreaming that all we need is 3.5% or 12 million Americans to become active for the regime to collapse, you are dreaming. Please feel free in the comments section to describe the precise mechanics of that collapse. I’d love to know. Yes, Trump could die sooner than later but having Vance in the White House does not end MAGA.

Sorry, I don’t have the answer except to continue the escalation of opposition and do not be seduced into inactivity by wishcasting or by some hope that overturning the House will magically erase this era.

Organizing must continue on a local networked basis around the crushing issues that most people feel and repudiate. Allow the communities around you to define the issues and encourage locals to take leadership and keep it out of the hands of untrustworthy Democrat politicians.

I do have my own personal fantasy: ungovernability. Not 12 million people. But two dozen major cities in a state of constant non-violent prolonged rebellion — no business as usual. Hundreds of disruptive sit-ins. Thousands of minor arrests. Student strikes. If we could sustain that for a month, then maybe some Republicans will notice and take a walk to the White House. Finally, we must present a simple post-Trump agenda that clearly speaks to the concrete issues the population suffers: wages, health care, and child care as starters. Allow me to dream. +++

In a Mississippi prison, a broken arm turned into an amputation. In a Minnesota county jail, a man showing classic stroke symptoms was allegedly ignored until he collapsed and died. In New York, a man detained by immigration officials — and later transferred between facilities more than 10 times over three months — temporarily lost the ability to walk due to untreated infections.

In theory, all of these medical issues were treatable — and despite the many flaws in U.S. health care, “treatable” is usually a reassuring word. In prisons, jails, and detention centers across the country, it often means something different, however. Medicines, procedures, and specialists may all exist, but people may not get access to them until permanent harm or even death occurs. Last week, The Marshall Project reported that over the last decade, in New York prisons alone, at least 30 people have died of preventable or treatable conditions.

In many of those cases, the problem begins with prison staff not taking incarcerated people seriously when they describe symptoms. In recent reporting, my colleague Joseph Neff told the story of Jason “Poppy” Phillips, who died from an infection of the epiglottis — the cartilage in the throat that directs air to the lungs and food to the stomach. The condition has a 99% recovery rate, but staff disregarded the increasingly frantic complaints of Phillips, his cellmate, and Phillips’ relatives, who were trying to secure help from the outside. After Philips collapsed, one nurse remarked that “he’s on the ground for bed.” The staff involved did not respond to Neff’s requests for comment, and the corrections department declined to discuss the case.

Similarly, at a Washington prison, Alex Kuhnhausen told officials he was coughing and sneezing blood when they put him in solitary confinement for possessing a homemade needle with suboxone, a drug used to treat opioid addiction. Clinical staff, often focused on his drug use, repeatedly misdiagnosed Kuhnhausen’s worsening illness. By the time he was hospitalized, doctors said he was too sick to survive life-saving surgery on his damaged heart valves.

“The medical staff guessed him right into the grave,” Kuhnhausen’s wife, Katie, told the news outlet Investigate West. “They essentially told him he was a junkie.”

Kuhnhausen, who was 25 years old, died of kidney failure and sepsis, and the latter is an extremely common killer in U.S. detention settings, according to a USA Today investigation published last month. In a review of Department of Justice data, reporters found that at least 1,780 sepsis or septic shock-related deaths over a recent eight-year period, and that many “would have survived sepsis had they been free to head to their doctor’s office or a nearby hospital.”

Sepsis is a condition where the body’s extreme reaction to an infection causes organ damage, and, left untreated, can lead to death. Drug use is a risk factor for sepsis, but according to USA Today, it’s common for clinicians in carceral settings to assume symptoms are a direct result of drug use, rather than of serious infection. Take Avery Borkovec, as an example. At a prison in Boulder, Colorado, Borkovec turned so pale due to a staph infection of the blood that other incarcerated people had started calling him “Casper,” like the cartoon ghost. When he collapsed, a nurse tried four times to revive him using Narcan, the opioid overdose-reversal agent, assuming that the emergency stemmed from drug use rather than an infection, according to USA Today.

Even when frontline clinicians believe the people they are treating, financial pressures often delay and dissuade appropriate care. In state prisons, health care is frequently outsourced to private contractors paid a flat rate per person — and every hospital trip, specialist visit, or course of medication comes straight out of their profit margins. According to a report earlier this year from the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit think tank that works to reduce mass incarceration, privatized health care behind bars “functions like a cost control service for corrections departments, organized around limiting spending and fending off lawsuits.” At the same time, the university-run prison health system in Texas — often held up as an alternative to corporate contractors — “remains underfunded, understaffed and underprioritized,” and prone to many of the same ills, according to The Texas Observer.

This week, the Chicago Sun-Times published a report based on more than 100 lawsuits against one of the largest and most notorious prison health-care companies in the country: Centurion. It found a recurring pattern of Centurion staff ignoring prisoners’ medical complaints to the point of serious complications or death. The report comes just after the state of Illinois extended a temporary contract with Centurion, to replace its prior provider, Wexford Health Sources, which has also faced similar accusations. The Sun-Times reported that Centurion did not respond to their requests for comment.

Also, on Friday, the Tampa Bay Times reported that incarcerated people with cataracts in Florida have systematically been denied eye surgeries for years, leaving some permanently blind. Centurion and the state corrections department are both defendants in a lawsuit filed in October — and neither replied to the outlet’s request for comment.

Some advocates for prisoners say this kind of delay is not only unethical, it’s also fiscally shortsighted. Mississippi Today found that corrections officials in Mississippi routinely delay treatment for hepatitis C, a curable infection that is widespread behind bars. A person with direct knowledge of care in the system told the news outlet that some patients were considered “not sick enough” for the treatment, which can cost up to $30,000. Without treatment though, many of those patients will progress to liver cancer and failure, which is more expensive to treat and has a far higher mortality rate than hepatitis C.

In jails and detention centers, the churn of short-term custody creates other ways to avoid dealing with serious illness. In Tacoma, Washington, this week, advocates said ICE tried to put Greggy Sorio — who had already had a toe amputated and was using crutches after months of vomiting blood and stomach pain — on a 20-plus-hour flight to the Philippines instead of keeping him under medical care. His attorney told The Seattle Times: “Often they [ICE] prefer to deport you, so if you are sick or you are dying, that will not be while you’re in active custody.” On Tuesday, a judge blocked Sorio’s deportation.

Hepatitis C is common behind bars, in part because it’s highly transmissible and prisons are congregate settings. Indeed, in many cases, incarceration itself generates the health problems that then go untreated. It’s also common for incarcerated people to develop vitamin deficiencies from both an insufficient diet and a lack of sunlight, reported Penn Live this week.

The Eighth Amendment prohibitions on “cruel and unusual” punishment are supposed to be a backstop for incarcerated people facing illness. To win a civil rights case over medical care though, it’s necessary to clear a “deliberate indifference” standard, and prove that officials were actually aware of a serious risk and chose to disregard it.

Last year, a Business Insider analysis of nearly 1,500 federal appellate decisions found that only about 1% of Eighth Amendment claims filed by incarcerated people clear the deliberate indifference bar.