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Critics say constitutional amendment, which will also limit supreme court’s independence, is ‘funeral for democracy’Pakistan’s parliament has passed a controversial amendment to its constitution that will expand the powers of the army chief and grant him lifelong legal immunity while limiting the independence of the supreme court, in a move critics described as a “funeral for democracy”.Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s powerful army chief who is widely seen as a de facto ruler of the country, was the main benefactor from the 27th constitutional amendment, which was passed by the parliamentary lower house on Wednesday. Continue reading...

MAGA insider Laura Loomer suggested President Donald Trump was not to blame after he chose to meet with a former terrorist the day before Veterans Day.On Monday, Trump welcomed Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa to the White House despite his past ties to terrorism. The Syrian leader had links to Al-Qaeda under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, and he battled U.S. forces in Iraq before entering the war in Syria. At one point, al-Sharaa had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head and was eventually imprisoned by U.S. forces in Syria for several years.Loomer blamed the meeting between him and Trump on "the people who work for President Trump.""Sometimes I feel like some of the people who work for President Trump deliberately go out of their way to sabotage him," the Trump insider wrote Tuesday on X. "Who said: let's invite the ISIS terrorist to the White House for a photo op in the Oval the day before Veterans Day? How many US soldiers did Julani kill?"Several of Loomer's followers accused her of holding Trump blameless. "I think it's high time that people stop making excuses for Trump by blaming the people around him like he has no control whatsoever," one person replied to Loomer. "Just remember the guy sitting in Florida who everybody MAGA thought was not qualified to be president is doing far more conservative things than Trump ever thought of doing.""I am a huge Trump supporter and voted for him 3 times. I hate feeling betrayed by what he's doing but I am," another commenter said. "He's imploding from within his own administration. It's his fault tho... He's his own worst enemy because his ego blinds his common sense."

A UK politician has warned Donald Trump could "destroy" the BBC. The British Broadcasting Company director general, Tim Davie, as well as head of news Deborah Turness, resigned Monday following criticism of a documentary aired about Trump. An internal memo at the BBC suggested two parts of Trump's speech in the Panorama show had been edited together to make it look as though he explicitly encouraged the Capitol Hill riot of January 2021. Trump has since responded to the documentary and the resignations of Davie and Turness in a post to Truth Social. He wrote: "The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught 'doctoring' my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th."Thank you to The Telegraph for exposing these Corrupt 'Journalists.' These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election. On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!"But Ed Davey, a member of the UK parliament and leader of the Liberal Democrats party, warned that Trump has the power to "destroy" the BBC following the Panorama documentary. Responding to Trump's Truth Social post, Davey wrote: "It's easy to see why Trump wants to destroy the world's number one news source. We can't let him."The BBC belongs to all of us here in the UK. The Prime Minister and leaders from across the political spectrum should be united in telling Trump to keep his hands off it." Outraged members of the public agreed with Davey, with one person calling on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to "make it abundantly clear to the fool Trump" that the president's opinion of the BBC was of no interest.Davey also called the former director general a "decent man doing a difficult job" and warned the White House and Trump's statements on the BBC are worrying. He wrote: "I had my disagreements with the BBC under Tim Davie but he was a decent man doing a difficult job. To see Trump's White House claiming credit for his downfall and attacking the BBC should worry us all."In Trump's speech in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, he said: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women."However, in the Panorama edit he was shown saying, "We're going to walk down to the Capitol... and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell." Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has since described the BBC as "100% fake news."

A fierce ally of Donald Trump Sunday sounded the alarm about what she sees as a detrimental alliance the president has made.Trump has previously enraged some parts of his Make America Great Again (MAGA) base with his embrace of Qatar, a Middle Eastern nation that played a role in Israel-Hamas negotiations. Far-right Trump fans condemn Qatar for its links to nations that sponsor terrorism.Laura Loomer, a MAGA influencer who has been dubbed "The Trump Whisperer" due to her close ties to the president, is one such individual who doesn't like how close Trump has become with the Middle Eastern country.Early Sunday morning, she dropped a lengthy screed on the subject of Qatar."I really wish President Trump would come to terms with the fact that Qatar is not our ally," she wrote on X. "I would also really like to see the Emiratis and the Saudis pledge to triple their investment commitments into the US to wedge out Qatar under the condition that President Trump designates the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign Islamic terrorist organization when Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS) visits the White House and meets with President Trump this month."She continued:"Obviously I don’t speak for President Trump, but why would we want or need to be handcuffed by Qatar, a global sponsor of Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian proxy terrorism? Why would we want Qatar to have any leverage or influence over the US simply because of money and a $400 million plane?"The influencer then added, "I’m sure there’s plenty of Money to replace the Qatari commitments.""The reality is, until the United States tells Qatar to go pound sand, we are not going to see an enforceable Trump admin initiated designation of the Muslim Brotherhood, because a designation of the Muslim Brotherhood would mean having to cut ties with Qatar since Qatar funds the Muslim Brotherhood and HAMAS," she wrote. "This would also mean that we would have to shut down the Qatari embassy in Washington DC that likely wishes they could bribe every single politician in DC to support Qatar and oppose designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign Islamic terrorist organization."

When President Donald Trump was in China, he left Xi Jinping with very little. But one reporter noticed it was similar to what Trump got with Russian President Vladimir Putin."I mean, look, it's the old diplomatic strategy, right? Take what you get, declare victory, and go home," said New York Times reporter Peter Baker, speaking to MSNBC's Katy Tur. "Whether it is a victory or not, beyond being able to say you've got one is the bigger question." At this point, however, Baker said that Trump's wins look "modest." "I was struck when the president said that he gave this a 12 on a scale of 10 for being a great meeting, and that they made a lot of progress and 'We're very close on some important things,'" Baker quoted. "That's almost word-for-word the things he said when he met in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. I was there in the room for that, he said. It was a 10 out of 10, not 12, but it was a 10 out of 10. 'And they made a lot of progress. And we're very close on some really important things.'"Trump visited Alaska to meet with Putin and lobby for an end to the war in Ukraine."And of course, we all know what happened after Alaska, which is nothing," said Baker. "So, you know, you've got to be careful about overevaluating how much this will be worth. If it means, though, that there is sort of a, kind of a truce in a way, that there is a less hostile relationship for them now."The exchanges, he said, are less hostile and less volatile, and that's the only real progress.

Trump and the billionaires and foreign fascists he’s aligned with are both stronger than most think and weaker. Today I’ll deal with the stronger part; tomorrow, the weaker.We’re living in a moment when the line between democracy and dictatorship is far less clear than we like to believe. As a recent analysis by Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, puts it, we’ve already moved onto the midpoint along the spectrum between democracy and dictatorship where “competitive authoritarianism” lives.That’s the world of regimes that hold elections but use their control over the nation’s systems to skew the rules, restrict opposition, weaponize institutions, vandalize the truth, and destroy/ignore democratic norms. We’re more than halfway down that road in just ten short months.In the United States today, it’s impossible to ignore how much of that template was laid out by Viktor Orbán to the Heritage Foundation, which embedded core strategies of his authoritarian rule over Hungary into Project 2025, and is now being executed step-by-step by Trump and his lickspittles.And with ICE making warrantless arrests while brutalizing and now spying on protesters with Stingrays and Pegasus, Putin’s FSB’s secret police are also providing a model for Trump.We often comfort ourselves with the idea that elections alone guarantee democracy, but the fact is that democratic institutions can be hollowed out from within even as ballots are still being cast.In Hungary, under Orbán, elections exist, but the playing field is so tilted using tools like gerrymandering that the opposition never has a fair chance, the media was captured by Orbán-aligned oligarchs, and both the courts and the legislature were packed to the point where they lost their autonomy.That Hungarian model is now being mirrored in America. Project 2025’s blueprint doesn’t call for an overt single‐party take-over; rather it tweaks the administrative levers, centralizes power, bypasses checks and balances, staffs courts, commissions and agencies with loyalists, undermines election administration, and deploys state power to punish dissent while preserving the appearance of normalcy.Where are we on the spectrum? Much further than many pundits will admit.We now have elected and Trump-appointed officials who openly defy precedent, judicial rulings, and the rule of law; we have partisan weaponization of powerful institutions capable of punishing dissenters, ranging from the DOJ to the FBI and the IRS; we have dark-money networks influencing everything from policy to courts with the blessing of a corrupt Supreme Court; and we have billionaire capture of most of our media, producing widespread disinformation and naked attacks on the very idea of truth.That is less a democracy and more a system of “managed competition,” where electoral outcomes are shaped in advance, not determined by a fair contest. In short, the clock is running fast toward a complete loss of democracy, the “autocratic breakthrough” I’ve written about before.And while millions of Americans show up for protests — which matters — protests alone are nowhere near enough.In effect, while protesters may feel emboldened and signal a national discontent, in the absence of durable organization, leadership, and strategy the protests are easily absorbed, marginalized, or rendered irrelevant by Trump’s fascist forces and billionaire supporters once the streets are empty again.This is precisely the gap the Trump-Orbán-Putin model exploits. At the same time the marches are occurring, the foundation of the GOP’s up-and-coming fascist autocracy is being built: the staffing of key agencies, the rewriting of rules under emergency or administrative power, the gerrymandering and court packing, the stealth takeover of local precincts and state and county election commissions.We must be careful that the dazzle of street energy doesn’t blind us to the quiet but decisive work of tearing down the institutional foundations of authoritarian rule that Trump, the GOP, and their morbidly rich backers are quickly laying. If we’re to stop America’s slide toward fascism we must face that stark reality.The details underlying Project 2025 echo Hungary’s path with startling specificity. In that country a small, wealthy clique around Orbán orchestrated the capture of media, courts, electoral oversight bodies, and the constitution itself, which they then re-wrote (as Republicans are planning to do to ours when they get control of just a few more states).Orbán changed campaign finance rules, muzzled the press, and built a client state reliant on personal loyalty rather than democratic accountability. Want a government contract? Toss some money Orbán’s way, or at his family, or to his closest cronies. Want a pardon? Ditto. An exception to rules, laws, or even taxes? Ditto again.In the U.S. we see an analogous thinning of institutional independence, combined with the same type of cult of personality that always characterizes autocratic strongman governments. Trump’s openly expressed contempt for civil service norms, his threats to independent agencies, Republicans’ ideological staffing of courts all were cloned from the Hungarian template.And while the U.S. remains superficially democratic — voting still happens — the basis of open, free, fair, competitive elections is under vigorous assault by “tech bros” and other billionaires who openly disdain democracy itself.Trump announced last week that he’s sending “election monitors” to California and New Jersey — even though these are entirely state and not federal contests — presumably to intimidate both voters and election officials around the balloting happening in those states next week.Red states are gerrymandering to prevent Democrats from ever again controlling the House of Representatives. As I lay out in The Last American President, voter purges and ballot challenges knocked over 4 million mostly-Democratic voters off the rolls or prevented the ballots they cast from being counted in 2024, giving Trump and the GOP the White House and Congress.So what must Democrats — and unaffiliated/independent democracy advocates — do?We have to go beyond showing up in the streets and writing outraged posts on social media (although both do help). Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light.We need leadership and institutions capable of organizing, strategizing, and executing on multiple fronts: precincts, courts, local elections, media ecosystems, and state regulatory agencies. Protest without public faces and follow-through is like fireworks: beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.Our challenge is both structural and strategic, and, lacking hundreds of morbidly rich billionaires funding us like Trump has, we’re already way behind.It’s not enough to oppose; we must propose, build, and defend. Like Bernie Sanders is constantly pointing out, we must fight for reforms that fortify democracy: enforce campaign finance transparency, build public horror of concentrated media and money power, demand independent courts, safeguard election administration from partisan capture, and work to guarantee that our vote is harder to take away than our guns.We must train a generation of leaders who don’t just show up for the “march” but stay for the precinct meeting, the town hall, the election board challenge. We must invest in institutions — particularly the DNC — that outlast ephemeral flare-ups of outrage and build resilient and genuinely progressive democratic infrastructure.This is, after all, a progressive populist moment, as the Zohran Mamdani campaign in New York City and crowds showing up for Bernie and AOC’s Anti-Oligarchy Tour show. We just have to join it fully and ride its power.Here’s the plain truth: any movement that wants democracy to prevail must realize that its job is just beginning when the banners are raised and the cameras roll. The billionaire-funded rightwing movement bent on authoritarianism has its candidates, its loyalists, its media echo-chamber, and its policy train.This moment demands no less. We can no longer simply debate about policy or personality; we’re in a contest of governance models, of democratic vs authoritarian futures. James Carville recently told Jen Psaki that, “You aren’t scared enough yet!” Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the entire Democratic Party need to hear that message and act now. Along with the rest of us.The longer we leave the field uncontested, the more power we hand to those with a blueprint. The window is narrowing, and the Hungarian/Russian lesson is clear: when the opposition wins the street but not the state, democracy loses.All of us who believe in a republic of citizens — not subjects — must work to build not just rallies but infrastructure, not just energy but strategy, not just slogans but institutions.Join progressive organizations and get inside the Democratic Party. Bring energy, enthusiasm, and passion. If you’re inclined and capable, run for office yourself.The hour is urgent. The stakes are existential.

President Donald Trump spoke on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Japan on Tuesday, and his comments were so overly political and partisan that one retired four-star general was left disgusted. Speaking in Japan, Trump teased the possibility of more wars, despite his 2024 election pledge to get the United States out of international wars and consider "America First" policies. "We will not be politically correct. You don't mind that, do you? When it comes to defending the United States, we're no longer politically correct," Trump rambled. "We're going to defend our country any way we have to. And that's usually not the politi-, politically correct way. From now on, if we're in a war, we're going to win the war. We're going to win it like nobody ever before. You know, we'd go in with — we'd blast the hell out of countries. Shouldn't have gone in. By the way, if you don't go in, that's even better. We don't have to go in peace through strength. But, you know, we'd go in, we'd win, and then we'd leave. They used to say to the victor belong the spoils. Well, we'd be the victor. Then we'd leave. Because we had people that didn't know what the hell they were doing."MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire said it's hardly anything new to see Trump treat military events like campaign rallies. This is his third example. Speaking to Katy Tur on Tuesday, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey said that it may not be new, but it isn't right. "He's unconstrained. And I think when you take that presentation aboard the carrier in Tokyo Bay, which sounded unhinged and was cringeworthy."He noted the new Japanese Prime Minister was also on hand as troops chanted USA. "It was bellicose. It was resonating with those young sailors. That's the other thing. You know, there is a widespread feeling among some in the military to push back against what they consider woke strictures on the armed forces. So we ought to be concerned about this," the general continued."If that speech in Tokyo aboard a carrier had been made by a military officer, he would have been canned and court martialed for violation of politicization of the military," McCaffrey continued. "But we got a real problem. This message is being heard, and people are responding to Trump's rhetoric."

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) blasted the Trump administration Sunday for its ongoing military strikes on suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean, labeling them as “extrajudicial killings” that he argued were similar to how the Iranian or Chinese governments operate.“The drug or the crime war has typically been something we do through law enforcement, and so far they have alleged that these people are drug dealers,” Paul said, appearing on Fox News Sunday. “No one's said their name, no one's said what evidence, no one's said whether they're armed, and we've had no evidence presented. So at this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings. This is akin to what China does, to what Iran does with drug dealers, they summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public, so it's wrong.”President Donald Trump has authorized at least ten strikes on suspected drug-carrying sea vessels since September, killing at least 43 people that his administration has labeled as “narco-terrorists.” The strikes have received widespread bi-partisan condemnation for potentially being a violation of international law, with the most-recent strike occurring late Thursday night into Friday morning, killing six.Trump’s authority to authorize the strikes has also been questioned by critics, who point to Congress’ sole authority to approve declarations of war. Congress has not approved the strikes, and, according to Paul, have not even been briefed on the operations, or the evidence – should any exist – that those targeted were actually engaged in drug trafficking.“We haven't had a briefing; to be clear, we've gotten no information, I've been invited to no briefing, but a briefing is not enough to overcome the Constitution,” Paul said. “The Constitution says that when you go to war, Congress has to vote on it, and during a war, there's a lower rules for engagement, and people do sometimes get killed without due process.”Rand Paul on Trump's strikes on boats: "I would call them extrajudicial killings. This is akin to what China does, what Iran does with drug dealers -- they summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it's wrong." pic.twitter.com/NPCIt9kzgT— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 26, 2025