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Today: Trevor Alixopulos, who draws comics and illustrations and lives in California.

From everyone at Flaming Hydra: please enjoy this free post. We wish you a fine holiday, and we look forward to seeing you again on Friday, December 26.

Issue No. 469

Little Buddy
Trevor Alixopulos

NEWS ON FIRE

Little Buddy

by Trevor Alixopulos

THE AUDACIOUS, DARING, AND BOUNDLESS ADVENTURE BEGINS ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 26

“HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”

Get ready for MOBY-DICK WEEK. A kaleidoscopic festival of insights and unusual experiences based on the novel by Herman Melville, surfacing from the deep beginning Friday, December 26.

NEWS ON FIRE

It’s the NEWS and it’s on FIRE

Battle Lines
19 states sued the Trump administration over crazy weirdo RFK Jr.’s plan to deny all Medicare and Medicaid payments to facilities providing gender-affirming care to minors. Just so we’re clear: The administration is trying to stop payments for everything from insulin to band-aids to any hospital that prescribes hormone blockers that might keep trans kids from experiencing the irreversible changes of puberty as fast as Robert F. Kennedy (who doesn’t believe in germs and thinks vaccines cause autism) thinks they should. 

Interestingly, the legal challenge includes several states that, until now, have been  several states that until now have been fence-sitters on the matter of trans rights. Maine, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin had neither drafted protective legislation for gender-affirming care nor tried to eliminate it, as Florida, Alabama, and North Dakota have done. Now all three states have joined the new lawsuit filed in Oregon this week. 

One sign of which way the winds are blowing: even the nation’s leading opportunist, California governor Gavin Newsom, has signed some protections into law.

Photo: Senator Chris van Hollen, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

We Are Going to Win
Kilmar Abrego-Garcia will spend Christmas with his family. ICE is under a full-blown restraining order, despite trying desperately to re-deport the poor guy. Raise your glass to judge Paula Xinis this Yuletide. – Sam Thielman

Grand Jury records released by the Department of Justice in the Epstein Files

[REDACTED]
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice released the second tranche of Epstein Files, and even for Americans long since rendered punch-drunk by our daily parade of horrors, it was a doozy. For one thing, after putting in the work to diligently scrub clean the files of any damning references to public figures, the DoJ managed to blow an unknown number of its own redactions in a manner reminiscent of the guy in your office who faked Adobe Acrobat proficiency on his resume: it turned out a simple highlight and “command C” click was all it took to read many of the PDF files in full.

The latest revelations were nauseating. In perhaps the most attention-getting file, a note purporting to be a letter from Epstein written in a jail cell on the week of his death was addressed to convicted sex offender ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮, and mentioned that the “▮▮▮▮▮▮” (who, in 2019, was of course ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮,) loved to “▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮.” 

So since we’re unlikely to get another drop of accidentally-unredacted evidence, the uncertainty will just have to hang there: did the President of the United States ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮, or was he an accomplice to it?  – Zach Rabiroff

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