The Common Ills: The Snapshot

Friday, January 02, 2026

The Snapshot

Saturday, January 2, 2026. As the new year begins, Chump continues his efforts to destroy American healthcare, though he'd like it to be The Epstein Scandal is not over and more details are emerging, Megyn Kelly drops her pretense to 'care' about sexual assault and to have been a 'victim' of it, and much more.

Starting with this press release issued by Senator Alex Padilla's office yesterday:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) issued the following statement after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted its stay on a federal judge’s order barring the Trump Administration from deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles, ending the federalization of California’s National Guard and returning authority over them to the state:

“Today’s order affirms what we’ve said from the beginning: the Trump Administration’s choice to federalize and deploy National Guard troops in Los Angeles was unlawful. This deployment is reckless, harmful, and an abuse of executive power that has put service members in an impossible position.

“The fight is not over but I look forward to the remaining service members returning to their families, their jobs, and their primary critical missions as soon as possible.”

###

Moving over to the late Jeffrey Epstein who was Donald Chump's roll dog and best buddy for years and years as Epstein sex trafficked girls and women. Meredith Kile (PEOPLE MAGAZINE) notes:

A new report from the Wall Street Journal alleges that Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago spa had teenage workers make house calls to Jeffrey Epstein's mansion.

The report, which cites unnamed former Mar-a-Lago and Epstein employees, claims that Trump's spa would send masseuses, manicurists and other spa workers to Epstein's nearby residence.

"Epstein wasn’t a dues-paying member of the club, but Trump told staff to treat him like one, the employees said," according to the report.

It also alleges that workers "warned each other about Epstein, who was known among staff for being sexually suggestive and exposing himself during the appointments."

[. . .]

Though Trump has continued to downplay his longtime friendship with Epstein since taking office for his second term, there was a disturbing mention of the president in the last drop of evidence.

One of the documents, dated Oct. 27, 2020, appeared to be an FBI intake report that featured the account of a former limo driver, who claimed to have met Trump in 1995, when he said he drove the real estate mogul to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

The document read, "[Driver] reported some of the things President Trump had spoken about during the ride while on his cell phone were very concerning. [Driver] reported he was 'a few seconds from pulling the limousine over on the median and within a few seconds of pulling him out of the car and hurting him, due to some of the things he was saying.' "

While telling the story to an unnamed woman years later, the driver alleged that the woman went "stone cold."

"[Woman] stated, 'He raped me,'" the FBI intake report read. "[Driver] said, 'What?' as [Woman] replied 'Donald J. Trump had raped her along with Jeffrey Epstein.' "

Chump supposedly banned Epstein from the resort but did he continue to send employees to do house visits? Was Chump was under the impression he wasn't aiding a crime if it didn't take place on his property? Because that's not how aiding and abetting works -- by sending his employees into a known environment for sexual assault, Donald Chump himself would be guilty as a partner to any crime. TMZ notes:

Donald Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein may be even worse than previously thought ... according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ says DT's Mar-a-Lago spa in Florida would send teenage workers to Epstein's mansion, despite it being an open secret among the staff that the billionaire would sometimes expose himself during appointments.

Shaun King (THE NORTH STAR) observes:

But the moral question isn’t simply, “Did Trump eventually kick him out?” The question is: why was the pipeline allowed to exist at all, and why was there no real accountability when staff reported misconduct?

Because here’s another key detail the Journal reported: the 18-year-old disclosed the incident to Mar-a-Lago’s HR team, but the incident was not reported to Palm Beach police, according to former employees and police. Police didn’t begin investigating Epstein until two years later, after a parent reported Epstein molested a 14-year-old girl.

Sit with that: an 18-year-old reports pressure for sex after being sent to Epstein’s home, and there’s no police report. That is not a minor administrative choice. That’s a decision that protects the institution and leaves other young women exposed.

This is what people miss when they reduce Epstein to a cartoon villain. A villain is one man. A system is what protects him.

TMZ also notes:

One of the members of the U.S. House Oversight Committee that's been releasing photos and documents from the Jeffrey Epstein estate has a New Year's resolution for the Epstein Files ... he wants to totally expose and put away the pedophile's enablers.

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat from Virginia who sits on the committee, tells TMZ ... "My New Year's Resolution for the Epstein Files is to get the files released, name names, and let the courts and the court of public opinion judge those who perpetrated, covered up, and enabled these crimes so that they never happen again."

And Subramanyam says Ghislaine Maxwell is one of their targets ... despite her currently serving a 20-year sentence in prison after being convicted of sex trafficking minors and other federal charges. He says Maxwell "should absolutely be held accountable for all the crimes she committed, including newly discovered crimes."

For those who've forgotten the ongoing release of documents taking place currently took an act of Congress. Prior to that, Chump referred to the crimes that took place as a "hoax" and refused to release documents. Also a point to remember, the law passed by Congress mandated that all documents be released by December 19th. That did not happen. Attorney General Pam da Bimbo Bondi refused to comply with the law and the bulk of the documents remain hidden from the public.

On the topic of the documents, let's note this video.

Lastly, CBS NEWS reports there are problems regarding the official story on Jeffrey Epstein's death and the actual camera recording devices.

Meanwhile, THE DAILY BEST has an interview that's getting media attention.

Pranita Chaubey (INQUISITR) reports:

Donald Trump’s name continues to pop up every time there is a mention of the Epstein Files, and now, longtime Trump biographer Michael Wolff has revealed that Donald Trump befriended Jeffrey Epstein for all the wrong reasons.

Longtime Donald Trump biographer Wolff revealed during Inside Trump’s Head Podcast that the two men allegedly shared a girlfriend. “This is [around] 1993, 1994, and Marla Maples (Trump’s former wife) is now coming into this picture, but it is also the moment in which Epstein and Trump are sharing a girlfriend,” said Wolff.

Wolff claimed that the two even had the same girlfriend once. The biographer revealed, “This is a Norwegian model and whatever the arrangement is, back and forth, I mean—again, they are playing with someone, and this is their shared, not only girlfriend, but kind of a shared joke.”

As a part of the bombshell Epstein files dump, an email link had a mention of a Norwegian cosmetics heiress, accompanied by a text from Epstein that read: “My 20-year-old girlfriend in ’93, that after two years I gave to Donald.”

It's a sad life but no one's mourning Chump. Not even with all his health problems is anyone feeling sympathetic toward the vulgarian. Hannah Demissie (ABC NEWS) reports:

For weeks, President Donald Trump has said that he received an MRI at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in October, but when asked about the procedure by the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Thursday, Trump and his doctor said that he actually got a CT scan instead.

"It wasn’t an MRI," Trump told the Journal. “It was less than that. It was a scan.”

Last month, Trump maintained that he got an MRI, telling reporters on Air Force One that he would "absolutely" release the results.

The White House has not specifically said why Trump received the scan. In November, Trump claimed the MRI was part of his yearly physical.

Trump’s physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella told the Journal that the president had received a CT scan -- not an MRI. Barbabella said Trump’s doctors initially told him they would perform either an MRI or a CT scan.

THE DAILY BEAST's David Gardner adds, "Donald Trump has confirmed that he wore compression socks to treat his cankles amid growing scrutiny over his health as America's oldest president."

Let's use his dementia and declining health to address his treatment of Marjorie Taylor Greene one more time. Alex Nguyen (MOTHER JONES) notes:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said that her defense of survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and threat to disclose the identities of some of the men who abused them broke her relationship with President Donald Trump, who said his “friends will get hurt” if she went through with it.

Greene’s claim came in remarks from two long interviews published Monday in the New York Times Magazine. After a closed-door meeting with Epstein victims in September and a subsequent news conference where she made the threat to share the names of some of the men, Greene said Trump rebuked her.

“The Epstein files represent everything wrong with Washington,” the congresswoman told Robert Draper of New York Times Magazine, highlighting how Epstein went unpunished for decades and was allowed to continue to sexually assault girls and young women.

Greene announced in November that she would resign on January 5, 2026, a year before her term ends. “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked, and used by rich, powerful men should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for,” she stated in the video.

TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE. It's not just a John Ford play from the 1600s by John Ford, it's also Megyn Kelly's brand. Which is why you did not find me defending her when she came forward to talk about her 'victimizing' by Roger Aisles. It was known, even if outlets didn't report it, that Megyn was a party girl, a party girl who used her body to work her way to the top. She wasn't a victim. And she only came forward when others had outed Roger Aisles -- her mentor whom she was so close to in the public eye and now needed to break away from him lest people catch on that her rise at FOX "NEWS" resulted from a I'll-scratch-your-pudenda-if-you-scratch-my-testicles. If you grasp that, then you'll understand her latest nonsense which Loren Piretra reports on in the video below.

In other news of Tramp Media, Bari Weiss is in the news. Tom Boggiono (RAW STORY) reports:

A video from CBS News posted to X on New Year's Day, designed to introduce the journalistic path recently promoted CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil will be taking, was greeted with no small measure of skepticism on social media.

Since the controversial Bari Weiss was picked to run the CBS News division despite a lack of experience in television news, every move has been scrutinized and Dokoupil’s pledge reaffirmed concerns about the dismantling of journalistic standards.

Coming not long after Weiss spiked a “60 Minutes” investigation into the horrific experiences of migrants detained by ICE and transferred to El Salvador's CECOT prison facility, Dokopuil’s comment that “the press has missed the story” too often set off a wave of derision and accusations of dumbing down the news.

Ava and I noted Bari in yesterday's "Media: The best and the worst of TV showed up in December" about her censoring a 60 MINUTES news segment:

She has repeatedly insisted that her problem was news value and that the program didn't live up to it.

How did a town hall with the widow of a racist live up to it?

We may be doing another piece on racism in the near future, in terms of people trying to justify racism on the basis of a Black performer and pretending that he and a TV performer were on the same playing field when in fact the program has been notoriously racist over the years, that the power structure was racist and that the Black performer was a guest on one episode. They try to pretend this was an equal playing field when it was no such thing.

We bring that up because when Chump's right wing buddies took over CBS, this was White people and they installed White Bari Weiss. And she and the power structure chose to present the wife of a racist -- who echoes his racists opinions -- and treat her as some sort of expert who should be allowed to pontificate for one hour of prime time TV.

Mary Whitfill Roeloffs (FORBES) noted, "An hour-long interview with the widow of political commentator Charlie Kirk on CBS criticized for its editorial approach drove away big advertisers without drawing a hoped-for big audience in what could be a defining moment for Bari Weiss, the newly appointed editor in chief of CBS News." Brian Steinberg (VARIETY) noted, "Viewership was off 11% compared to the average viewership in the hour year to date, according to data from Nielsen, and the “demo” audience was down 41% compared to its year-to-date average." Justin Baragona (INDEPENDENT) makes the poor performance look even worse by bringing basic facts, "Making the low viewership for the Erika Kirk town hall even more striking is that CBS pulled in a large audience for the annual Army-Navy game that afternoon, drawing 7.3 million viewers per Nielsen’s early measurement. The post-game show, which served as a lead-in for the Kirk-Weiss chat, attracted a viewership of 3.5 million and 901,000 in the advertising demo, according to Nielsen." Even with a huge lead-in, the 'news' special flopped. THE NEW YORK POST explained it wasn't even a hit on YOUTUBE.

Maybe Bari Weiss needs to answer for that?

And maybe the new owners of CBS and PARAMOUNT need to answer to shareholders about why they paid Bari $150 million for her website -- that's about $149 million more than it was worth.

Mainly we should all be aware that Bari Weis killing that news segment on 60 MINUTES was censorship.

She had all these excuse about how it wasn't news and it wasn't ready.

But she's the one who put on an Erika Kirk special. Three months and three days after racist Charlie Kirk was shot dead, she put on an Erika Kirk special.

How did that qualify as news?

Are we supposed to pretend that Erika had anything to share? She's still working through the stages of grief described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in ON DEATH AND DYING. She's not come out of the grief, she has no lessons to share, she's garnered no perspective. If anything, she's avoided dealing with her grief and loss.

This month alone, Sean Hannity interviewed her on December 8th, she took part in THE NEW YORK TIMES DealBook Summit, she showed on Megyn Kelly's show, she showed up on Glenn Beck's show, and on December 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st she was part of AMERICAFEST. That's not a full listing of her events and appearances

She's not taken time to grieve and she's overexposed.

How was she ever going to have anything worth sharing -- let alone anything news worthy worth sharing?

She wasn't. Nor will JD Vance when Bari sits down with him for another 'news special' next month. She'll baby him as well. Spend a whole hour babying him. Failing to grasp that her job as an interviewer is to push back, is to question. Bari Weis has neither the skills nor the training to be an editor-in-chief as she's made that clear. And she didn't need to wait until 2026 to share that with America.

Lastly, the new year has begun and with it? Chump's latest attempt to destroy the American people. Reed Abelson (NEW YORK TIMES) reports this morning:

Renee Rubin Ross is facing the stark reality of having to pay much more for her health insurance this year, now that Congress has ended 2025 without extending the enhanced federal tax credits that brought down the cost of her coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

“I don’t even know how to get my mind around it. It’s the opposite of affordable,” said Ms. Ross, who relies on Obamacare to cover her family of four in California. Staying on the same plan for 2026 will cost about $4,000 a month, $2,700 more than the roughly $1,300 per month she had been paying.

Since the subsidies were first expanded in 2021, allowing more people to qualify and lowering their payments, millions of Americans have benefited. A record 24 million people enrolled in Obamacare for 2025, with a vast majority receiving some tax credits. Many were self-employed or worked for small businesses that did not offer health insurance.

But without the enhanced subsidies, many people are seeing the cost of coverage more than double, increasing by hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month, because the tax credits are now in line with what they were before.

2025 end of the year pieces include Rebecca's "hottest men of 2025," Ann's "2025 in films" and Stan's "2025 in films," Mike's "Idiot of the Year," Martha & Shirley's "2025 in books (Martha & Shirley)," Kat's "Kat's Korner: 2025 in music," Ruth's "Ruth's Media Report 2025," Ava and my "Media: The best and the worst of TV showed up in December" and my "2025: The Year Of The Jig Is Up."