Thoughts for the Day, December 2, 2025: MSU gets it right. Hegseth has got to go.
MSU gets it right
To no one’s surprise MSU football coach Johathan Smith was fired less than 24 hours after the end of the season. Smith was an epic failure that will cost MSU millions of dollars as they will pay the remainder of the $33 million left in the remaining five years of his contract. This combined with the disastrous and embarrassing tenure of the previous coach Mel Tucker has left the MSU program in a shamble as they work their way out from under serious NCAA penalties for recruiting violations under Tucker.
The hiring of former Northwestern University head coach Pat Fitzgerald is a major start in the right direction. Fitzgerald is only 50 years old, but he was the head coach at NU for 17 years. As a player at NU, Fitzgerald overachieved as a linebacker due to his drive, his brain power and his willingness to do whatever it took to succeed. He took this same attitude when he was named head coach at age 31. His success at NU was amazing considering his teams consistently had less talent and depth due to the high academic standards that NU required for admission. His teams played hard, they played smart, and they didn’t beat themselves. I expect Fitzgerald to have great success at MSU. Because of the NCAA sanctions, the MSU fans should allow Fitzgerald the time to build his program and not demand immediate results.
I compare the hiring of Fitzgerald to the Lions hiring Chris Spielman and Dan Campbell, the Tigers hiring A.J. Hinch, and the Pistons hiring J.B. Bickerstaff all of whose first priority was to establish a winning culture built on quality individuals who were committed to winning over individual success.
It is good for the State of Michigan, the B1G, and college football to have a strong MSU football team. It is good for the fans to have a strong rivalry between U of M and MSU in which every game is a tossup. U of M/OSU may be the greatest rivalry in college football, but U of M/MSU when both teams are competitive is not far behind.
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You cannot make this up.
I am still trying to make sense of President Trump pardoning Juan Orlando Hernandez — a former president of Honduras who was convicted in the United States of a vast drug-trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions and had only served 17 months of a 45-year sentence.
Here are excerpts from the NY Times and ABC News. From day one of his second term Trump has ranted and raved about the influx of drugs from Mexico, Central America, and South America. Since late August, the United States has built up a military presence in the Caribbean to battle drug cartels in the region. He has hit 20 boats and killed 80 people who allegedly were bringing drugs to the U.S. Trump calls Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, a cartel boss. On Saturday, Trump declared the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
And then, on Friday afternoon, Trump gave a “a Full and Complete Pardon” for Hernández. The juxtaposition, “displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken ‘cocaine-fueled bribes’ from cartels and ‘protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state.’”
Trump’s pardon of Hernandez came as a surprise to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, who said the decision appears to contradict the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug trafficking from the Caribbean.
“Why would we pardon this guy then go after [Venezuelan president Nicolas] Maduro for running drugs into the United States? Lock up every drug runner! Don’t understand why he is being pardoned,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said in a social media post over the weekend.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., called Trump’s decision to pardon Hernandez “shocking.” “He was the leader of one of the largest criminal enterprises that has ever been subject to a conviction in U.S. courts, and less than one year into his sentence, President Trump is pardoning him, suggesting that President Trump cares nothing about narco-trafficking,” Kaine said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Trump makes my head spin.
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Hegseth has got to go
Last week Hegseth said he watched the entire destroying of the boat in the Caribbean Sea in which two survivors were killed with a second strike in violation of the international and U.S. laws. According to the Washington Post reports last Friday, Hegseth ordered the second strike.
Since the report in the Washington Post, many Republicans and Democrats in Congress have expressed shock at the second strike killing the survivors. Congress members have promised a thorough inquiry into the second strike. President Trump has said he wouldn’t have ordered a second strike.
Today Hegseth denied that he ordered the second strike and said that the strike was ordered by Admiral Frank Bradley.
Here are excerpts from today’s NYT. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday that he had not noticed survivors in the water during U.S. military strikes that killed 11 people in the Caribbean in September.
His remarks, at a cabinet meeting at the White House in which he cited the “fog of war,” were the latest from Trump administration officials meant to address questions about whether the U.S. military committed a war crime when it launched a second strike on a boat on September 2, killing two survivors of the initial attack who were clinging to the burning wreckage.
Mr. Hegseth had said that he watched the operation live on video before he “moved on” to his next meeting. But following news reports about the second U.S. strike, Mr. Hegseth said he “didn’t stick around” to see it. The defense secretary said Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander of the operation, “made the right call,” in ordering the second strike.
By denying he ordered the second strike, Hegseth is setting up Bradley for potential “war crimes”. Hegseth takes credit when it earns him the praise of Trump, but when the heat rises, Hegseth throws the Admiral Bradley under the bus.
Hegseth has got to go. Hegseth gets my Onion of the Day.
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The elites keep getting more elite
From Heather Cox Richardson. As wealth and power flow through the executive branch, Trump is overriding the rule of law that is designed to protect the rest of us from self-dealing by unscrupulous individuals. On Wednesday he commuted the sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, convicted in August 2024 of defrauding 10,000 investors in a $1.6 billion scheme that included securities and wire fraud. A judge sentenced Gentile to seven years in prison. He reported to authorities on November 14, was incarcerated, and was released less than two weeks later after Trump commuted his sentence.
There is a growing sense that an elite group of wealthy people is running the world without accountability to the law, and that the Trump administration is protecting and even advancing the people in that group. That sense is key to popular anger at the administration’s refusal to release the FBI files about its investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
MAGA voters backed Trump in the belief that he would hold such people to account, but it is now clear he is protecting them instead…
The realization that Trump is bolstering and protecting an entitled elite rather than defending everyday Americans victimized by them has dovetailed with this administration’s undermining of the economy, firing of civil servants, attacks on public health, and destruction of the nation’s social safety net…
…today’s power elite is a borderless network of people connected not to nations or their fellow citizens but to each other. They exchange nonpublic information and capital to enable the members of that group to control events, disregarding the effects of their decisions on those outside their network.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested Friday that the deep unpopularity of AI comes in part from the fact that it has become a symbol “of a society in which all the big decisions get made by the tech lords, for their own benefit and for a future society that doesn’t really seem to have a place for most of the rest of us.”
In November, voters turned away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats, expressing concerns about the economy and “affordability.” Chris Stein of The Guardian explained today how 33-year-old John McAuliff flipped a Republican seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in those elections. McAuliff attracted Republican voters by going door to door, talking with voters about data centers and the infrastructure they require and noting voters’ own rising electricity costs.
McAuliff told Stein that the rising prices are “essentially an artificial tax on everyday Virginians to benefit Amazon, Google, some of the companies with the biggest market [capitalizations] in human history. Which is not to say they don’t provide benefits to those communities, but we need to do a much, much better job of extracting those benefits, because the companies can afford them.”
The elites keep getting more elite. Everything Trump does benefits Trump, his family, and his elite donors. This should not be a surprise to anyone who is paying attention.
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No Blog on Wednesday
Leah and I will be attending the Pentatonix concert at the LCA in Detroit on Wednesday. Although I will be traveling on Thursday, I plan on writing a blog on Thursday if possible.
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Quote of the Day: On ABC’s This Week this morning, Representative Don Bacon (R-NE), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said to host Jonathan Karl: “Putin’s the invader, he’s the dictator, he’s murdered all his opponents. But I just don’t see that moral clarity coming from the White House. We saw that Wall Street Journal article yesterday that many people around the president are hoping to make billions of dollars—these are all billionaires in their own right—from…Russia, if they get a favorable agreement with Ukraine. That alarms me tremendously. I want to see America being the leader of the free world, standing up for what’s right, not for who can make a buck…. I don’t want to see a foreign policy based on greed. I want to see it based on doing the right thing.”
Orchid of the Day: Michigan Men’s basketball team for their performance in winning the Players Era Championship Tournament in Las Vegas last week by a combined 110 points over ranked opponents, Gonzaga, Auburn, and San Diego State. I have been watching basketball for a very long time, and I do not recall a team ever performing as well as Michigan did in the three games. The games were basically over 10 minutes into the game as Michigan jumped out to early leads and kept the pedal to the medal on offense and defense for the remainder of the games.
For Gonzaga’s coach Mark Pew, the 40-point loss was the worse lost in his over thirty-year and 902 game career at Gonzaga.
Onion of the Day: Pete Hegseth. He has got to go.
Question of Day: What is the reasoning behind the pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernandez? Can someone please explain it to me?
Lyrics of the Day: I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but ….
If you think you know the answer, post your response in the comment section of the blog.
Lyrics of the Day for November 25, 2025. Turn the Page by Bob Seger.
Video of the Day:
[Official Video] Little Drummer Boy - Pentatonix
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