Chris Arsenault

 

Medford, Long Island (WABC) -- The owner of a cat sanctuary and an unknown number of cats were killed in a fire on Monday morning.

The blaze broke out around 7:15 a.m. at the Happy Cat Sanctuary on Dourland Road. The home served as a safe haven for hundreds of cats.

Officials say owner Chris Arsenault, 65, was found on the main floor in the back of his home. Roughly 100 cats have been found so far -- both dead and alive.

Friends say Arsenault went back into the home to rescue the animals after the fire broke out.

"This man lived in an 8x10-foot bedroom with a mini fridge and a microwave, every dime he made, everything he collected went toward the animals, he was selfless, he took nothing for himself, this is just so unfair," said friend Lisa Jaeger.

Pope Francis unleashed a historic attack on the Trump administration over its cruel treatment of migrants — and takes specific aim at remarks made by J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert

The Pope, head of the Roman Catholic Church, issued a rebuke of Donald Trump's mass deportation plan, stating that it removes the migrants of their inherent dignity as people and "will end badly."

Usually, one to abstain from commenting directly on the internal politics of individual countries, Pope Francis made his new remarks in a letter addressing U.S. bishops. In it, he invoked the Bible's Book of Exodus and said that God is "always close, incarnate, migrant and refugee" and pointed out that Jesus Christ was "expelled from his own land" when his family fled to Egypt and had to "take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own."

Putting fake Christians to shame, Pope Francis went on to state that Jesus loved "everyone with a universal love" and taught us to see the "dignity of every human being, without exception. Thus, all the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa.”

He then turned his pen towards addressing the United States directly:

"I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality. At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”

It was the next part of the letter that has really infuriated MAGA supporters. Recently, Vice President J.D. Vance — who was baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church in 2019 — attacked the Church's compassionate teachings on immigration. Proving that he either doesn't understand Catholic theology or would prefer to cherry pick what he likes and doesn't, Vance butchered a medieval concept known as "ordo amoris" or the "order of love."

"As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens," Vance told Fox News. "That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world."

Of course, the idea that one should love those closest to you doesn't mean that you shouldn't love people from other countries. Vance shamelessly twisted the meaning to suit his party's xenophobic views. St. Augustine, who pioneered the concept that Vance was referencing, certainly didn't advocate for an authoritarian mass migration program.

In his letter, Pope Francis wrote that "Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the 'Good Samaritan', that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception."

Francis warned against deploying "an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth." He went on to urge the bishops in the United States to continue working "closely with migrants and refugees, proclaiming Jesus Christ" and "promoting fundamental human rights. God will richly reward all that you do for the protection and defense of those who are considered less valuable, less important or less human!" he added.

Pope Francis then turned his attention to the entire Catholic Church, urging its followers "not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters." He concluded by calling for all of us to work towards a "a society that is more fraternal, inclusive and respectful of the dignity of all." In other words, we need to build a world where MAGA is not the law of the land.

 

Trump's Deportations

 

The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.

The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.

By then, Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being. But until the girl collapsed, Lala had managed to escape an emergency.

Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the loose network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is also called, is lately in the news. Two weeks ago, it helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that experts fear could become a full-blown constitutional crisis.

In interviews with ProPublica, Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is rarely seen and little understood. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to reach this country and live here, it is the last act, the final bit of America they may experience.

All but one of the flight attendants requested anonymity or asked that only a nickname be used, fearing retribution or black marks as they looked for new jobs in an insular industry. Because ICE, GlobalX and other charter carriers did not respond to questions after being provided with detailed lists of this story’s findings, the flight attendants’ individual accounts are hard to verify.

But their stories are consistent with one another. They are also generally consistent with what has been said about ICE Air in legal filings, news accounts, academic research and publicly released copies of the ICE Air Operations Handbook.

That morning over Mexico, Lala said, the girl’s oxygen saturation level was 70% — perilously low compared with a healthy person’s 95% or higher. Her temperature was 102.3 degrees. The flight had a nurse on contract who worked alongside its security guards. But beyond giving the girl Tylenol, the nurse left the situation in Lala’s hands, she recalled.

Lala broke the rule about talking to detainees. The parents told Lala their daughter had a history of asthma. The mom, who Lala said had epilepsy, seemed on the verge of her own medical crisis.

Lala placed the oxygen mask on the girl’s face. The nurse removed her socks to keep her from further overheating. Lala counted down the minutes, praying for the girl to keep breathing.

---

The stories shared by ICE Air flight attendants paint a different picture of deportations from the one presented to the public, especially under President Donald Trump. On social media, the White House has depicted a military operation carried out with ruthless efficiency, using Air Force C-17s, ICE agents in tactical vests and soldiers in camo.

The reality is that 85% of the administration’s “removal” flights — 254 flights as of March 21, according to the advocacy group Witness at the Border — have been on charter planes. Military flights have now all but ceased. While there are ICE officers and hired security guards on the charters, the crew members on board are civilians, ordinary people swept up in something most didn’t knowingly sign up for.

When the flight attendants joined GlobalX, it was a startup with big plans. It sold investors and new hires alike on a vision of VIP clients, including musicians and sports teams, and luxury destinations, especially in the Caribbean. “You can’t beat the eXperience,” read a company tagline…

-ProPublica

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ice-air-deportation-flights?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=toc

She Connected the Dots before the Rest of Us Even Found the Pencil

Heather Cox Richardson just handed us the clearest, most unflinching blueprint of how the U.S. government is being dismantled under the second Trump administration—and she backed every word with receipts. Her March 27, 2025, dispatch isn’t analysis. It’s evidence. It’s a field report from the front lines of a soft coup.

The scale of what she wrote felt too outrageous to be real. Venmo payments with eggplant emojis tied to a Signal chat about bombing the Houthis? A Department of Government Efficiency that’s already cost the U.S. $500 billion? The IRS gutted. HHS torched. Social Security collapsing? Surely this was speculative—some dystopian metaphor.

It wasn’t. Every detail she cited came from real reporting by real journalists in Wired, The Washington Post, Reuters, NBC News, The New York Times, and more. Richardson didn’t theorize—she documented. And the result is devastating.

Here’s just a fraction of what she laid out:

• DOGE, Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” has cost $500 billion—10% of all IRS revenue from last year.

• 20,000 IRS employees fired, especially in enforcement. Billionaire audits? Gone.

• HHS cut $12 billion in mental health and disease tracking grants, then laid off 10,000 more workers, including 3,500 from the FDA and 2,400 from the CDC.

• Social Security’s website crashed 4 times in 10 days. New rules require in-person ID checks for people without internet.

• A Tufts student was detained by ICE after writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed.

• The Department of Education is being shut down.

• FEMA is next.

• Columbia University had $400 million withheld until it complied with Trump’s cultural directives.

• Mike Johnson is openly floating the idea of eliminating federal courts.

• Words like “climate crisis,” “diversity,” “segregation,” and even “peanut allergies” are being purged from federal communications.

• And J.D. Vance is now in charge of purging the Smithsonian of what the administration calls “anti-American ideology.”

This isn’t dysfunction. It’s doctrine. It’s Project 2025, written by Russell Vought, now head of the Office of Management and Budget, and championed by Vance, who once said: “Unless we overthrow [the current ruling class] … we’re going to keep losing." and “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.”

Heather Cox Richardson took that ruthlessness seriously. She traced it from the eggplant emoji to the ICE van. From the IRS to the Smithsonian. From the layoffs to the list of banned words. She didn’t write a warning. She wrote the truth. And she deserves our full attention. Read it. Share it. Archive it. Then ask what you're willing to do now that you know.

-Fear & Loathing: Closer to the Edge

 

"There is no national security information more sensitive that the discussion of war plans"

 

We know that Donald Trump is not fit to be sitting in the White House.  He is a dangerously disordered president, and we have observed enough aberrant behavior to fill a psychiatric textbook.  We know from his exchanges with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that he has been quick to brandish his “bigger (nuclear) button” that has the unilateral power to kill us all. 

And now we know that he is surrounded by a national security team whose members are totally unfit to serve and are willing to lie to an American public and an American Congress that has yet to come to grips with the normalization of Trump’s “no rules” presidency.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already lied to the press about the nature of the group chat involving war plans, and on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe couldn’t recall any discussions of weaponry or targets, not even generic targets, in their testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.  So don’t expect any accountability as the president and his national security team do their best to vilify an excellent journalist invited to the chat.

We can be thankful that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic and an outstanding journalist for decades, responded to a call on the messaging app Signal that involved every member of Trump’s national security team, including the vice-president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and leading intelligence and military officials.  We are fortunate that Goldberg, sitting in his car on a Safeway parking lot, took a call that he initially believed to be bogus or simply part of a disinformation campaign.

Goldberg was invited by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who may have intended to invite U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer (JG), who had no more need to be in such a group chat than did the Atlantic’s JG.  Typically, the trade representative would never be part of the Principal’s Committee.  Conversely, Goldberg probably has a better idea of overall U.S. national security than Greer, who is obsessed with tougher export controls and sanctions against China, and little else.

Every government official with a high-level security clearance is inundated with warnings against using personal cell phones in discussing government matters.    Nevertheless, one of the participants in the chat, special envoy Steve Witkoff, was on the call on his cell phone while in Moscow. 

Russian intelligence has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, and Witkoff’s outrageous use of his personal cell phone for any discussion, let alone a discussion of precise military information dealing with the use of force.  The make-up of this particular group suggests that some or all of these members have been using Signal regularly for sensitive discussions.  It is particularly odd that not one individual questioned the presence of a journalist on the chat!

There is no national security information more sensitive that the discussion of war plans, which requires the highest level of operations security.  These discussions must be held in a sensitive and security facility that can be found at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, or throughout the intelligence community. 

If an individual cannot be present at such a facility, at the very least he or she must be in a SCIF (a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to prevent unauthorized physical or electronic access.  The high-level members even travel with their own classified communication systems. Electronic surveillance and penetration have a long history. 

When I was the intelligence advisor to the U.S. delegation at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1971-1972, all professional matters were discussed in a SCIF that was flown to Vienna, Austria.  When I was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1976, I had to keep my office shutters closed because the KGB was targeting embassy windows to gather the signals emanating from the IBM Selectric typewriters that were used in the day.  In my 25 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, I was not permitted to bring a cell phone into the building because of the ease of foreign electronic penetration.

The group of misfits who occupy the highest national security positions that exist in Washington were simply too unwilling on a Saturday morning to travel to a SCIF.  It is highly likely that these Signal chats have been a regular feature of this particular team for the past two months. 

We know that Donald Trump has no understanding or appreciation for intelligence security because of the case of the United States of America v. Donald Trump that filed 40 criminal counts related to his removal of sensitive classified materials from the White House to various insecure locations at Mar-A-Lago, including a bathroom, a ballroom, and a utility closet.

In the first months of his first term, Trump revealed a highly sensitive document—obtained from Israeli intelligence—to the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador.  Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State and led Mossad—Israel’s CIA—to withhold the sharing of sensitive information for a period of time. 

A U.S. official stated that Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”  It must be added that some of our best intelligence on foreign terrorism comes from foreign liaison sources, including intelligence sources that can be found in adversarial countries.

Finally, it must be noted that the participating members of the group chat, with the exception of Goldberg, were members of the Principals Committee of the National Security Council, which is the senior interagency forum for consideration and decision making of the most sensitive national security issues.  The NSC was created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to advise and assist the president on national security and foreign policy. 

The intelligence services in Moscow and Beijing probably cannot believe their new form of access to such decision making.  Unfortunately, nothing will stop Trump from concentrating on his revenge tour and his campaign against the rule of law, not even the mishandling of Washington’s most sensitive intelligence information.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

 

Noem’s choice of watch

 

When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem visited El Salvador’s most notorious mega-prison on Wednesday, she sported an eye-catching piece on her wrist that experts have identified as an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that sells for about $50,000.

The high-end Swiss watch lent a striking contrast to Noem’s tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where imprisoned men watched silently from a crowded cell as she recorded a video for a social media post warning undocumented immigrants not to enter the United States. “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem said.

Noem’s choice of watch kicked off a race among internet sleuths to identify it and infuriated immigration advocates, who said the juxtaposition was insensitive to the harsh reality of mass imprisonment and deportation.

“You’re in front of all these people in a very poor country, who are in the bottom 10 or 20 percent of their country … and it looks like you’re just flaunting your wealth while you flaunt your freedom,” said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group…

“For a public servant to be wearing it is quite the statement,” said Alan Bedwell, a vintage watch dealer and the owner of Foundwell in New York, who compared it to a “flag-waving exercise.”

“To be wearing that in El Salvador while visiting a” maximum-security prison, he said, “is kind of like a big F you.” […]

The Washington Post

Plutocrats Are Attacking Your Social Security

 

Insults, slurs, nasty comments and contempt for Social Security sprout up everywhere these days in Washington. Although Trump himself insists he will protect the program, his underlings sure hate it, and by extension, the nearly 70 million elders who rely on it; and “Rely” is an understatement – for many it’s their sole lifeline. These people voted for Trump in their multitudes.

But now they hear from his advisor Elon Musk that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” or from billionaire financial services CEO turned commerce secretary Howard Lutnick that only “fraudsters” cash their social security checks.

It’s hard not to conclude that these haughty plutocrats want to snatch grandma’s money and leave her destitute. Of course, this has long been official GOP policy. Just look at what the Republicans want to do to Medicaid. The House passed a bill in January to gut it, even dispensing with the prolonged, mendacious and de rigeur [required by etiquette] campaign to tar it with fraud. That’s the big lie about Social Security – that it’s riddled with fraud and therefore must be not just trimmed but slashed.

I suppose Medicaid, like food stamps, so offends multimillionaire GOP House members that they figured they could dispense with the propaganda campaign and just ravage it.

Besides, all Medicaid recipients are poor, thus easily bullied by the mega-rich. And with its Medicaid bill, the Republican House revealed that it’s full of bullies, who’d like nothing better than to ditch Medicaire, Medicaid, Social Security and of course food stamps, so that the indigent can skip doctor’s visits, ration their chemo and their insulin, eat fewer, smaller meals and sleep under the stars. ‘Cause that’s where all this is heading – dispossessing tens of millions of people and shoving them into the ranks of the homeless.

Add the 70 million Americans on Social Security to the 90 million on Medicaid and you’re looking at 160 million people rendered destitute by snobs like Musk, Lutnick and GOP House leader Mike Johnson.

These honchos of the Trump Sanhedrin apparently hate anyone who’s not rich. Lutnick best exemplified this vile disdain in a recent TV interview, where he proclaimed that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t mind if she didn’t receive her Social Security check and only loud-mouthed “fraudsters” would grip about that.

Well, I don’t know how wealthy Lutnick’s mother-in-law is, but I’d bet she has a lot more cash on hand than your average Social Security recipient, so it sure would be nice if these Beltway plutocrats would stop bashing Social Security. Trump could snap a leash on them if he wanted, but he hasn’t.

Meanwhile lots of us are so grateful he ended the threat of nuclear annihilation via a U.S./Russia blow-up that frankly, that’s rather distracting. Nevertheless, this ferocious combat against the poor’s skimpy sources of sustenance is hard to ignore.

Yes, we’re happy we won’t be incinerated in Biden’s insane attack on Russia and we hope there will be no World War III sparked by a U.S. assault on Iran, which could quickly turn radioactive and would bust the global economy. Also on the wish list is a halt to the Gaza carnage, something Trump did once with his ceasefire/hostage deal and could easily do again, if he wants.

But now that the Atomic Apocalypse is off our bingo card and we are permitted to survive, for lots of members of the working class the next question is, how? If aristocrats like Musk and Lutnick keep trashing ordinary peoples’ means of subsistence, are they paving the road to a hell of illness, hunger and destitution for 160 million Americans? That’s not much of a platform for the GOP to run on in two years.

Some weeks back, Musk pronounced Social Security a Ponzi scheme. This is false. It is not investment fraud. It is a government-run insurance annuity; the citizens make a series of payments in return for a stream of income later in life. Insurance annuities are used for retirement planning all the time, and if Musk regards that as fraud, then he not merely slanders Social Security but an entire financial industry.

Does he regard a pension as fraud? Because that’s another comparison that Social Security brings to mind. Possibly he considers anything other than a retirement 401k in the stock market as some sort of cheat – a scam against Wall Street, which has lustfully eyed Social Security income since it was first christened by FDR.

As billionaires wage savage class war against the rest of us, where are the Dems? Largely mute, licking their self-inflicted wounds from the Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden fiasco. In fact, any party that could foist a monumental deceit like that presidency on the American people deserves to be demolished, then rebuilt, from the ground up, with new people.

But there’s no evidence of such efforts anywhere; the feckless Democrats, after nearly bumbling the world into nuclear Armageddon, under the “leadership” of a ruler who probably would have been happier in an old folks’ home, which they assiduously concealed, those Dems can’t seem to muster the will to rally for the great social programs they invented.

Why? Because snotty social climbers who advocated – Biden is Exhibit A – dismantling those programs long ago captured the party. Maybe just skip the Democrats altogether. Time for a new People’s Party.

In a country where, as of 2023, 36.8 million people live in poverty, where 56 percent of Americans cannot afford a $1000 emergency, where 22 percent of tenants spend ALL their income on rent and where even the phony, manipulated, government labor statistics – which don’t count as unemployed the hordes of people who gave up looking for work years ago – reveal that officially almost 7 million people lack employment while nearly 9 million work multiple jobs, in such a country, you would think that politicians with their eyes on the history books would be falling all over themselves to boost social welfare programs. But no! What was once called economic freedom, namely freedom from want, is today merely the freedom to starve and sleep under an overpass.

The infamous truth is that the U.S. is a nation of very few fabulously rich oligarchs who hog all the resources and hundreds of millions of ordinary people struggling to get by. Stealing their skimpy subsistence – and we PAY for our Social Security, it’s not a gift – is not only a way to lose votes, it will earn its promoters the condemnation of history. Trump evidently knows this. But his advisors? That’s another story.

CounterPunch: Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website.