Coffee Talk with Tiff

Coffee. Photo by Jonathan Thursfield.

It’s Tuesday…

President Shitshow’s public schedule for…

12/23/2025:

The President:
No public events scheduled.
Because golf counts as “executive time” when you don’t feel like governing.

Mar-a-Lago Out-of-Town Travel Pool:
8:00 AM – Travel pool call time
Purpose: transporting the President to hit a small white ball while the country does whatever it’s doing
Location: Palm Beach, Florida
Press: Closed, because the only thing less public than policy is the scorecard.

Current News:

The BEA dropped the GDP growth for the 3rd quarter.

BEA.gov:

Note:

Tech Notes:

Victory Lap:

My economic twitter peeps aren’t saying anything at the moment, beyond retweeting this guy.


Former Senator announces he has terminal cancer.

The full text:

Friends-

This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase:
Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.

Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence.
But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.

I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers.
As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.”
Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.

Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer.
This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad.
I can’t begin to describe how great my people are.

During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have.

Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school.
Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak).
This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive.
(Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.)
I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints.

There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst.
As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.

Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness;
not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality;
not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in).

Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.”
To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient.

It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle.
Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.

A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff.
That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears.

Such is the calling of the pilgrim.
Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment.

That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place.
But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet.

Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings.
But it does put it in eternity’s perspective:
“When we’ve been there 10,000 years…We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise.”

I’ll have more to say.
I’m not going down without a fight.

One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more.
Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived.
We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.

But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace:
“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9).

With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices,
Ben — and the Sasses

It’s the tweet. 12/23/2025.

#EpsteinFileGate.

This morning the DOJ dropped another 30,000 documents. The DOJ reminded us their current mission statement is to protect and defend President Asshole.

Show more =’s To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already. Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims.

This is current the big buzz on Twitter…

The letter was dropped after midnight eastern time.

Show more =’s:

The letter, which is postmarked just days after Epstein died, reads:

“Dear L. N. As you know by now, I have taken the “short route” home. Good luck! We shared one thing . . . our love & caring for young ladies at the hope they’d reach their full potential. Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to “grab snatch,” whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.

Life is unfair. Yours J. Epstein”

The letter was returned to sender. Reporting indicates that Epstein sent a letter to Nassar from prison before his suicide. The contents of that letter were never revealed. Additional documents show that the letter was submitted for handwriting analysis, though it is unclear if investigators reached a conclusion on whether or not this was definitively written by Epstein.

These images are from EFTA00036086 and EFTA00036085.

The text from the tweet. 12/23/2025.

I hope to have time this coming weekend to sit with the files and not be distracted by the holidays.


Peeked Over at “Lies Social”…


In personal news…

As I have mentioned in the comments section my laptop hard drive is failing. For Christmas I have gotten a Apple Mac Mini (it’s renewed not brand new and an older model). So, the learning curve is not as bad when I switched to Linux based, but it still does exist.

Programming note; Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and Thursday is Christmas Day the noon post is gonna be light as a result.

This is an open thread

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About Tiff 3429 Articles
Member of the Free Press who is politically homeless and a political junkie.