It is not everything that my family and my cousins in the Hemings family have been working on for more than 25 years, but it is a step in the right direction. Earlier this month, Cedric Jessup Jr. was buried in the Jefferson family graveyard at Monticello. Cedric was a Black man descended from Thomas Jefferson through Jefferson’s great-great grandson Moncure Robinson Taylor and Rachael Robinson, who was enslaved by Taylor’s family. Cedric was the brother of Gayle Jessup White, a long-time friend of mine who worked for 10 years at Monticello in public relations and as a community engagement officer whose job was to reach out to the Black community of Charlottesville and beyond, especially to people descended from slaves who were owned by Jefferson and lived and worked at the Monticello plantation.

Cedric Jessup’s burial at Monticello was facilitated by Robert Eppes, a past president of the Monticello Association, the group of white descendants of Jefferson who have refused for years to include descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson as members of the Association with rights to burial in the graveyard. Eppes was among those who voted against allowing the Hemings family to become members of the Monticello Association.

Gayle was quoted on the issue of the Hemings by a reporter for the New York Times who wrote a story about the burial at Monticello. In addition to being a direct descendant of Jefferson, Gayle is related to the Hemings family through Sally’s brother, Peter, who is her great-great-great grandfather. “The descendants of Hemings are also Jefferson descendants,” Gayle told the Times reporter. “There is no place on the mountaintop or anyplace in America where Black people should be barred.”

Gayle’s ancestor Peter Hemings was the younger brother of James Hemings, the older brother of Sally’s who accompanied Jefferson along with Sally to Paris when he was ambassador, learned to cook there from French chefs, and returned to Monticello and his life as a slave where he cooked for Jefferson until 1809. Peter Hemings learned was taught to cook by James and continued cooking for Jefferson after James left. He was also the chief brewer at Monticello.

The graveyard at Monticello has been a major sticking point with members of the Monticello Association opposed to the inclusion of the Hemings family as descendants of Jefferson. I remember attending meetings of the Monticello Association in 1999 and 2000 and hearing members claiming that if the Hemings family was included as descendants of Jefferson, they would “overwhelm” the graveyard, which they said was too small to contain Hemings descendants too. One Association member complained that there were way more people among Hemings descendants than there were white descendants of Jefferson, which just for starters ignored the fact that many descendants of Hemings and Jefferson have white, not Black, skin.

The size of the graveyard was an issue manufactured by Monticello Association members who opposed the Hemings. All along, when they were saying there wasn’t enough room in the graveyard for the Hemings, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello but not the graveyard, was willing to sell adjacent land, of which there was plenty, to the Monticello Association to expand the graveyard’s footprint. This was finally done a number of years ago, and the graveyard is now about twice as large as it used to be.

The Monticello Association owns the graveyard, which was separated from the land of Monticello itself and sold for $1.00 to the Monticello Association at the time that Jefferson’s home and land was transferred from the family of Uriah Levy to the Jefferson Foundation in 1923. My great grandmother, Mary Walker Randolph, was one of the founders of the Monticello Association who was involved in the transfer of the graveyard to ownership by Jefferson descendants.

The ownership of the graveyard is further complicated by the fact that there are two deeds. One deed includes the land under Jefferson’s grave and the graves of his wife and close relatives and friends, such as Dabney Carr, a friend since childhood. In fact, Jefferson established the graveyard to bury Carr when he died. He was the first person buried there. The deed for that land extends from the fence behind Jefferson’s grave to the main gate of the graveyard. That land is owned by descendants of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, about whom I wrote yesterday, who took care of Monticello and lived there with Jefferson in the years just before Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826. Technically, I, along with my sisters and children, are among the owners of that portion of the graveyard as descendants of Thomas Jefferson Randoph. The rest of the graveyard was deeded to the Monticello Association.

I hesitate to say that the Monticello graveyard is a magical place, but every time I visit and get the key to the graveyard, I open it and invite tourists to come in and explore the graveyard and take their pictures standing on Jefferson’s grave. The look on their faces is enough to argue that for them, as citizens of the country Jefferson helped found, the graveyard is magical. Over the years, I have also taken dozens and dozens of friends and Hemings cousins through the graveyard and pointed out the graves of my great grandmother and her two husbands – who were her second and third cousins – and my great aunts and uncles and the graves of my parents and my brother Frank and the graves of Uncle James and Aunt Mary, my father’s brother and sister. My brother and sisters and I and our Hemings cousins held graveside memorial services for my mother and father when they died. One day in the hopefully distant future, I will be buried at Monticello near my family and alongside my wife, Tracy.

Hopefully, if the Monticello Association comes to accept the Smithsonian’s new DNA findings and admits the Hemings are Jefferson descendants just as we are, one day my Hemings cousins will be buried somewhere along our row of graves in the Monticello graveyard. Some of us are directly descended from the man who owned slaves, and some of us are descended from the slave owner and one of the slaves he owned, Sally Hemings.

We Jefferson descendants are all one family, complicated and strained and sometimes misunderstanding of and nasty to one another, as America has long been to itself.

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ICE was never a good idea. It was always a cesspit filled with racists hoping to cleanse America of the people they hated. Now? It’s a rabid animal that has to be put down. There is no fixing ICE. It cannot be redeemed or returned to its core mission. This IS its core mission. It always was. The only difference is that they’ve stopped pretending to be law enforcement. ICE has become the fascist white nationalist paramilitary weapon it was intended to be from the start.

Abolish ICE. Fire every agent. Ban them from law enforcement for life. Charge them with crimes against humanity. Lock them up for 25 years. Execute the ones responsible for murder. Send the clear and unambiguous message that America will no longer tolerate lawless fascism. #NurembergThemAll

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Ogre Nation News Update!

Main Stories

:30 - 3:50 Trump’s Brownshirts shot a DoorDash deliveryman and may have left him paralyzed. If he survives. Abolish ICE. Nuremberg them all.

3:51 - 10:45 Trump banned MS Now, CNN, and Politico from the White House. His little fascist temper tantrum immediately bit him in his fascist ass.

We’re Living in the Stupidest Timeline

11:20 - 16:20 The EPA is going to manufacture a bullshit excuse about hormones in the water to ban contraceptives and medical care for the trans community

16:21 - 19:40 MAGAland is crying big, sobby tears about the Canadian national anthem being sung at the Buffalo Bills game last week. Boo fucking hoo.

Headlines for Short Attention Spans 19:41 -

19:41 - 22:38 Cornell University puts on a master class of rape culture. These are the seven rapists.

22:39 - 24:15 The crypto industry is pouring at least $30 million into the Ohio Senate race because Sherrod Brown thinks they’re thieving liars. Spoiler alert: They are.

24:16 - 25:20 The regime is stealing healthcare from another 750,000 Americans by crying “fraud!” with no evidence. The death cult strikes again.

25:21 - 27:05 Air Force Maj. Jason Watson is being court-martialed for speaking out against the regime’s illegal wars. Because that’s what fascist governments do to dissenters.

27:06 - 28:45 America’s first DEI (Didn’t Earn It) Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is moving forward with mandatory testosterone testing. What a fucking moron.

28:46 - 29:55 The Senate map is expanding for Democrats as Kansas and Nebraska turn into potential battlegrounds.

29:56 - 34:25 Just how fucked ARE Republicans? We’re no longer discussing how much they’re going to lose, but rather how much damage the coming bloodbath is going to do to Trump. Ouch…

Self-care of the Week 34:26 - 37:25

The Unedited Hotmess Livestream

The Fed Tracks Inflation and Employment—but What About the Long-Term Cost to Workers?

What!? Fighting inflation cuts your income? So which is worse, inflation making things more expensive, or the amount of income you lose in the long run? And nobody has checked?

Some readers will have some vague awareness that fighting inflation dampens the economy. For others, this, “cuts your income” part is a shocking idea. One so crazy you’ll think I must have it wrong.

Your right to wonder. Media have been terrible at getting the general public up to speed on this. But the media failure is a topic for another piece. There are numerous parts of this that are worth a more detailed description that will come in pieces to follow and some previous pieces I’ll link to.

SCROLL DOWN TO READ INFLATION COMIC STRIP

How Does the Federal Reserve Fight Inflation?

When the Federal Reserve (Fed) fights inflation it dampens the economy. There’s supposed to be less borrowing, expanding, spending. Everything slows down a little, and that leads to ever rising prices rising a little slower. That it cuts what employers offer new hires is in some sense a side effect, and in some sense a core target. Things besides pay slow down too, like businesses borrowing, expanding, and consumer spending. In that sense wages are a side effect. But the Fed also sees that when new businesses are expanding fast enough they have a hard time finding workers, so they offer higher wages and benefits, that can lead to higher prices. So getting the situation changed to where new hires are no longer getting higher starting offers is part of their target.

Does Fighting Inflation Lower Wages?

By the way, you might wonder, when wages go up do prices go up the same amount so you’re no better off? Not nearly. Employees really do benefit from the higher wage. Again, a topic for another piece.

As I’ve written before, regarding this part about new hires getting less, there’s a lot, a whole lot, more to it. The key thing is leverage. When there are so many jobs employers compete with one another to hire new people, the applicant has leverage to hold out for more. When there are too few jobs and lots of people apply for every job, then the employer has the leverage to offer less, and take it or leave it. “Next!”

Leverage does not just affect starting offers. First, people who start at a lower wage probably never catch up to where they would have been. Studies after the crash of 2008 when new college grads were getting low offers because jobs were scarce found that over the years they didn’t catch up. They never did as well as those who started much better a few years earlier. So it’s a wage loss that ripples through their whole career.

There are many other ways it affects you. If you’ve been employed for a while and expecting a raise, why should the employer give you one, or as much of one, when lots of new employees are coming in, and cheap? Why should they give a matching contribution to your 401(k), or as much of one, when they know you’re not going anywhere because jobs are tight? By far one of the best ways to raise your income is by changing jobs. Go to a new employer who values your experience and has to offer more to get you to switch. But that’s hard to do when jobs are tight. When unions negotiate new contracts they get better deals when employers are anxious about keeping their employees. That new contract will then set the standard for years to come. All of these, your sequence of raises, the retirement contribution, whether you could switch jobs, ripple forward for your working life and accumulate year upon year.

Do Workers Recover Their Lost Income After Inflation Falls?

When inflation rises enough that the Fed fights it there’s a good chance it will come down fairly quickly. The Fed will then loosen the reins, and the economy will get back to some normal.

But you won’t. The lower starting wage, the less retirement fund, the lower raises, the missed job switch, the union contract, are in the past and aren’t undone. They continue that ripple forward. You will end up at retirement with less.

Which Costs Workers More: Inflation or Fighting Inflation?

But would the inflation have been worse? You retire with less but things cost less. Do we know which is worse? No. Shouldn’t we calculate that? Yes. The Fed has done some looking at this a little way into the future, not across a working career. They acknowledge these factors affect people and that they do so over time. They point out it’s very hard to project so far forward across a whole career, and they’re right. Yet it’s essential that this be done as well as possible, and for that to be primary in decisions on fighting inflation.

Should the Fed Consider Workers’ Lifetime Earnings?

So two reasons to bring all this up. One, why isn’t every working person so aware of this that when they hear news about inflation, and fighting inflation, they immediately think, “They better damn well get this right so it works out best for us! So it doesn’t end up leaving us less than we should have had!”. Awareness that would put tremendous pressure on the Fed and the governmental/economic system, that the people are aware and watching.

Second, Fed policy. The lifetime effect of inflation policy is very hard to predict, but the Fed needs to make it policy to take it’s best shot and consider that data in making their moves. And here’s a vitally important part of policy: Employee results needs to be an enforceable rule. While inflation doesn’t just affect worker income it needs to be the highest priority. Inflation affects business and finance and multiple other factors. It also affects consumers, but darn near every consumer is also either a worker or part of a household with worker income, so it still comes down to how employees do.

What policy works best for employees can’t be the only consideration because other things are affected. But it can be the primary one. Calculate what move in any give circumstance best helps employees long term. Only then consider whether that’s so hard on business and finance that any balancing of action is warranted.

Business and finance interests, plus politicians’ claims regarding their record on the economy, put tremendous pressure on inflation policy. (Note this is not the same as Trump pressuring the Fed to lower interest rates. What’s proposed here is an optimal target to help people, regardless whether that means rates should go up or down. Trump only wants rates to go down, regardless of what’s best, so he can brag about numbers that look good on paper.) All of those other forces pressuring inflation policy? That needs to be flipped. Employees need to come first. That needs to be in the rules clearly enough that citizens and groups can challenge it when it isn’t followed.

Now you’re aware. Try the pyramid method. You make two people aware, and they each make two people aware, etc. It’s needed.

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The post Fighting Inflation Can Cut Your Pay. But By How Much? appeared first on DCReport.org.

Let’s get right to it: He claimed the arch will be used to “hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

The central tactical theory behind the use of snipers is that they use hardly any ammunition. Their job is the kill shot. The sniper is a one-and-done military asset. All the ammunition he or she needs can be carried by the sniper. Sniper rifles don’t shoot on full-automatic. They shoot a single bullet, then the next bullet is chambered, and if necessary, the rifle is fired again. Usually at that point, the sniper moves so his shooting position is not identified, and he becomes a target.

Trump wouldn’t know a round of sniper ammunition if it was served to him in a bun with ketchup. He doesn’t know the first thing about ammunition storage, either. Military ammunition is normally stored on heavily guarded military bases where it is kept under lock and key. If ammunition is moved from a military base, it is kept under armed guard 24 hours a day. If Trump’s arch is to be visited by the public, it cannot be a military facility where ID’s are checked and passes are issued, as they are at the gates of every military base in the U.S. and abroad. The “sniper ammunition” would therefore have to be under guard by active-duty soldiers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That would mean that the soldiers would need toilet facilities and an area where they could eat meals and rest between shifts of standing guard.

Trump’s announcement on Truth Social said he was turning his arch into what amounts to an armed camp “at the strong request of the United States military.” The Reuters news agency called the Pentagon and the White today House asking who had made the “strong request.” There was no answer from either place, because the request came from the dim reaches of what’s left of Trump’s own mind. It is not a coincidence that Trump’s proposed militarization of his arch comes as it faces a lawsuit in federal court. Judges are traditionally reluctant to interfere in matters of the Executive when they involve the military.

And there is the question of what Trump’s snipers would be shooting at. There are lots of cars going around the traffic circle, of course, making their way north and south on the George Washington Parkway. Why would they be considered targets? Visitors to Arlington National Cemetery are not there to commit acts of aggression, but to pay their respects to the military dead Trump holds in such low regard. Does he envision an invasion of undocumented immigrants flooding on foot across Memorial Bridge? Where would they go? Who would they threaten that they would need to be brought down by sniper fire?

Trump’s lie about his arch is another naked outrageous dodge to get around its construction being barred by a federal court. Trump used the same scam with his ballroom, which he now calls a White House “military complex” because of an underground bunker and an alleged “hospital facility” that would serve Trump himself and White House employees.

Our military is years behind Ukraine, China, Russia, and even Iran in development of a drone warfare capability, and Trump thinks that his arch, standing in the middle of a traffic circle between Memorial Bridge and Arlington National Cemetery, will be used as some sort of drone warfare facility?

The fucking Pentagon is a half-mile away. If he wants to store his drones and sniper ammunition, the Pentagon has 6.6 million square feet of above-ground space and who knows how many million square feet of additional basement space. Plus, the Pentagon has the added feature of already being under 24-hour guard, with its own mess, bathroom, and rest facilities for snipers on site.

Trump’s announcement about his “triumphal arch” is 100 percent unadulterated bullshit. Memorials such as those honoring Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson are there to commemorate the dead. Triumphal arches are supposed to celebrate great triumphs. What wars have we won lately? Certainly not the war with Iran, and not the wars fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, either.

Well, at least Trump has triumphed over the allegations of his sexual assaults and rape. If he ever gets his triumphal arch built, at least there’s that.

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Despite Tougher Standards, Marine Corps Data Show More Than 9 in 10 Women in Combat Arms Are Passing the Test

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world to Quantico, Virginia, last September, he delivered a blunt message: Things were changing fast in the newly renamed Department of War.

“No more division, distraction, or gender delusions,” he said. “We are done with that shit.”

What mattered going forward, Hegseth said, were standards.

“I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat [units] with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men,” he said.

The same day, Hegseth signed a directive requiring sex-neutral fitness standards for all troops in combat roles. The service began implementing the new standards earlier this year.

Marines take two fitness tests annually: a physical fitness test in the spring and a combat fitness test in the fall. In January, the Marine Corps began sex-neutral grading for combat Marines on the annual physical fitness test, which consists of a 3-mile run, a choice between pushups or pullups, and an abdominal plank. Since January, Marines in combat specialties have been required to score at least 210 out of 300 points.

The Marine Corps spring physical fitness test data obtained by The War Horse shows that more than 90% of female Marines who have taken the test have met or exceeded the standard.

Kris Fuhr, co-founder of the Women in the Service Coalition, which advocates for equal opportunities for military women, said she was not surprised.

“The women prepare and they train and they’re ready,” she said.

Women serving in combat specialties have always been required to meet the same job-specific standards as men, based on the physical demands of their chosen field, such as infantry or artillery. But the broader physical fitness tests taken by all service members once or twice a year serve a different purpose: measuring overall fitness. Those tests have historically been scored using age- and sex-based standards.

While Hegseth has argued that scoring women against a male standard will preserve the level of fitness required for combat, the new policy still allows standards to vary by age, with benchmarks declining for older service members.

According to the Marine Corps, 422 women currently serve in combat specialties, 400 of whom have taken the test under the new scoring standard. Experts caution that those results cannot predict how women in combat roles across the military will fare, given the small sample size.

“Women are a small part of the Marine Corps. Women are a smaller part of combat arms within the Marine Corps,” said Kyleanne Hunter, a Marine veteran who leads Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “Making generalizable conclusions from this is very, very difficult.”

But, she added, “It still tells the story that the vast, vast majority of the women who are in this career field are doing just fine.”

The War Horse has requested similar data from the Army but has not yet received it.

Hundreds of Women Have Served in Combat Roles

When the Pentagon moved to open all combat jobs to women, the Marine Corps resisted, seeking an exemption based on a study that service leaders said showed gender-integrated units performed worse than all-male units. Critics argued the study was flawed, and the secretary of the Navy denied the request.

Over the past decade, hundreds of women have gone on to serve in Marine Corps combat roles. Thousands more have served in Army infantry units, and a few have even completed the grueling process to serve in special operations roles.

Hegseth, however, has repeatedly questioned whether women in combat positions are being held to sufficiently rigorous standards. Within months of his confirmation, he ordered a review of combat arms standards before he directed the services to adopt sex-neutral fitness standards for troops in combat roles. The Pentagon has also launched a new review of women in combat, tapping the researcher who led the earlier Marine Corps study to lead the evaluation.

“I think his mandate is based on the belief that women can’t meet men’s fitness standards within combat arms,” Fuhr said.

The early Marine Corps data suggests otherwise.

According to Marine Corps data, 91.38% of women and 96.53% of men in combat arms who have taken the test since January have met or exceeded that threshold.

Hunter said that while the results are encouraging for women serving in combat roles, she cautioned that the new scoring system could still have negative implications for women.

“It can create unnecessary promotion problems,” she said.

A female Marine who might have earned a perfect 300 under the previous female scoring scale now receives roughly 240 points for the same performance under the male scale—comfortably passing the new requirement, but with a substantially lower score, which could impact performance evaluations.

Fuhr said she expects women to adapt.

“If you tell a woman what the standard is, she will do the work to not only meet it, but often exceed it,” she said.

This article from The War Horse was edited by Paul Szoldra, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

This article was originally published by The War Horse on September 15, 2026.

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